Gary Urtonhttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/gary-urton
Oral History Interview with Gary Urton, undertaken by Elizabeth Gettinger at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 23, 2009. At Dumbarton Oaks, Gary Urton has been a member of the Board of Senior Fellows in Pre-Columbian Studies since 2004 and chaired that group between 2005 and 2009.

EG: My name is Elizabeth Gettinger and today is the 23rd of July, 2009, and I’m here in the Peabody Museum. I have the pleasure of interviewing Professor Gary Urton, so thank you for talking with me today. To start things off, could you tell me how you first heard about Dumbarton Oaks and came to work there and what your initial impressions were?

GU: Well, for myself I think I first came to know of the existence of Dumbarton Oaks when I was actually in graduate school in the Classics. I now work in South American, but I entered graduate school as a Classics major and doing ancient history. As a graduate student I worked in the Classics library at the University of Illinois, and they had a very strong Byzantine studies program there. And so working in the library I always had to shelve books and I remember that very often I would shelve books that would have been published by Dumbarton Oaks from the Byzantine Studies program. I mean, I heard of it then and I was only aware that it was an odd name, but it was a venerable name because it seemed that they published works that were all quite interesting, very esoteric: Byzantine numismatics and Byzantine icons. And so I became aware of that aspect of it or the studies program within the institution, before I came into contact with the Pre-Columbian Studies. Then in my own studies I switched over from the Classics and from ancient history into archaeology and started working immediately in South American studies. And so now we’re talking about the mid-1970s, and this was a time when there was tremendous work being done in terms of symposia, in terms of workshops, et cetera, related to a real increase in activity in studying ancient civilizations not only in South America where I ended up working but in Mesoamerica as well. So, you have the Olmec volumes and the Chavin volumes from the symposium proceedings as well as from workshops and the study series, and those books were all staples of graduate student reading in the 1970s and through the ‘80s and on. Yeah, so from that time I became aware of Dumbarton Oaks not only as a place that published works that were very serious and of very high quality but particularly from the Olmec volume and the Chavin volumes. They both had at the end of the volumes – they published transcripts of the proceedings of the discussions of the participants in those symposia and so that penetrated my dim mind that, “Oh, there must be meetings that are held at these places.” So, then I became aware of the tradition of organized meetings among specialists in the field. And I just increasingly over the years became more and more familiar with the institution. And my first real involvement was, well, I guess on a couple of occasions I was invited to round tables, but then in the early ’90s I became interested in pursuing research on the Inca quipus, the knotted string recording devices, and at that time I started corresponding with and working with a colleague in Washington, Bill Conklin, who had contacts with Dumbarton Oaks, and we wanted to write a proposal for study of the quipus. And what we really wanted to do – we had corresponded with each other over time and so we sort of knew more or less where we stood, but we didn’t actually know how our ideas would be received and we wanted some perspective on them. So, we appealed then to the then-director of Pre-Columbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Elizabeth Boone, to ask for support for a meeting in which we would go – it would be a round table – we would go, we would present our overview of our proposed research and get reactions from scholars. Most of the scholars then were from the Washington, D.C. area and so that for us was a great opportunity to use the resources and sponsorship of Dumbarton Oaks to bring scholars together to begin to talk about this work. Then subsequently, very soon after that I applied for a fellowship to Dumbarton Oaks and actually got the fellowship, but at the same time I got a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and that was not a residential fellowship. And given complications of life with kids et cetera I determined that, well, I should take the National Endowment for the Humanities. So, I declined the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship. So, I’ve actually never been a resident as a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, and I regret that very much because everyone I’ve ever talked to has told me what a fabulous experience it is and how very rewarding and exciting it is working with the Fellows in the setting of the library and of the whole Dumbarton Oaks world. But then, soon after that time I was in Bolivia, and I was asked by Angeliki Laiou, a former director of Dumbarton Oaks, to join the Senior Fellows. And so, I first joined I think around ’92 or ’93 – I’d have to check my records – but somewhere around there. So, I served then a six-year term as a Senior Fellow, and during that time Angeliki was replaced by Ned Keenan as director, and then in terms of the director of Pre-Columbian studies Elizabeth Boone was replaced by Jeffery Quilter, and he and I worked together to organize a round table on the quipus and we subsequently published a book on that. So, my involvement just increased over time with Dumbarton Oaks. And then when I came to Harvard, my position here at Harvard is partially paid by Dumbarton Oaks, so I carry the title of Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies. So there, I didn’t think I had anything to say!

EG: So, in the collections at Dumbarton Oaks do they have quipus, or was this something you brought in to discuss?

GU: No, no they didn’t have quipus. I mean, they have some very nice pieces of Inca – or they have some very fine Inca objects, textiles, ceramics, but mostly textiles, and they have some really classic pieces, some pieces that if you study fine Inca tapestry work these are some of the classic pieces. But the reason that bill Conklin and I appealed to Dumbarton Oaks for support was that we knew that the Pre-Columbian Studies program had had a real interest in promoting work on the decipherment of the Maya glyphs and there was a long history there of support of that work. And we sort of fancied ourselves in those days as doing work that might ultimately lead to the decipherment of the quipu. So, we used a rather brash and probably immodest proposal or approach to our studies, but we felt, well, that we would draw on what we knew to be a long term Dumbarton Oaks interest in New World script decipherment to support our work. So, it was not so much that that was the home – it was not at all that that was the home of objects in the collection, but rather of a long standing support of the kind of work we wanted to do with the Inca recording system, the quipu.

EG: So, was the symposium you organized with Elizabeth Boone – I think it was called “Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America” – was that related to only the quipu or was that a symposium where you talked about other types of glyphs and writing systems as well?

GU: Yes, it was comparative, so it was Mesoamerican and South American. So, in those terms – actually, for that volume I’ve just written an introduction and part of that introduction is to go over the history of Dumbarton Oaks’s involvement in script and sign and notation system work in the Americas. So, there I review the history of where there has been a lot of support for scholars working specifically in the decipherment of the Maya glyphs as well as the work that myself and Bill Conklin and Jeffrey Quilter were doing on the quipus, and there were two comparative symposia. So, my point is that very often there was support for Mesoamerican workshops or Andean workshops or symposia. But on one earlier occasion Elizabeth Boone had organized a round table, and this was in I think the mid- to late-1990s or so, where she brought together people working on the Maya glyphs and well as people working on the quipus and had papers given. So, there was an opportunity for people working in two areas to compare methods and theories, approaches, and results from the work. And so, then Elizabeth and I felt that in this most recent setting that there were real advantages to having a comparative conference. The work in the separate areas has proceeded at pace. There have been many, many conferences since that original one that focus either on the Maya glyphs or the Inca quipus. We’ve made some real advances in the study of the quipus over the intervening, say, almost ten years, eight or ten years or so, and so we felt that it was time for another comparative symposium. And so, what we wanted to do and what we did, what we managed to do with the conference was to bring together people working in the two areas. We had very productive conversations, really good discussions about where we felt we stood in the two areas, what some of the comparative similarities and differences were in communication systems, in the writing and signing systems in the two areas, and then discussed ways of advancing research in the two areas. So, that’s what Elizabeth and I both as well as Joanne Pillsbury, the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, felt was the strength of the proposal for that symposium was – it brought those people together. And I in general think – I mean, my own view is that those are the strongest symposia organized by Dumbarton Oaks, ones that bring together people working in Mesoamerica and the Andes around topics that are of common interest to them. So, whether it has to do with seafaring or it has to do with ideas about death or a whole range of topics – there’s so much fragmentation in the academy today and people work in increasingly restricted areas of specialization. And I think one thing that Dumbarton Oaks has been good at and one thing it does very well is to bring people together from those two great regions of ancient American civilizations to talk about the actual material that they’re working on, the similarities and differences, and also to talk about ways, kinds of approaches, methodologies that are used perhaps in one area that can be beneficial to the area, and just general sort of theoretical problems, then.

EG: Is there a relationship or community among the South American scholars and Mesoamerican scholars, or is this something that really only happens every once and a while in the symposia?

GU: You mean in terms of comparative discussions like this?

EG: Yeah.

GU: We tend to be fairly fragmented. I mean, there’s a lot of awareness between the two fields of who’s doing what. I mean, among those who really do have some broader interest in work between the two areas, and most archaeologists do have a general interest, Dumbarton Oaks acts as a focal point for gathering information and redistributing information on work in the two areas, and it has always been a very strong force in helping develop and promote a general consciousness of a wider objective among scholars working in Pre-Columbian studies. So, whether you’re in Maya studies or Aztec, Central Mexican studies or Andean studies, Dumbarton Oaks does a very good job of drawing people together in workshop settings or in symposia or just communicating opportunities for grants and research support et cetera that goes equally to Mesoamerica and the Andes. So, there’s a general awareness on the part of people who do pay attention to that sort of thing – not everybody does – of work in both areas that produces, then, or results in a general sense of community of scholars working in pre-Columbian studies. And that’s the core group I would say that attends the symposia whether they’re in one area or the other or if they’re comparative symposia. And they tend to be the people who also direct their students to make applications for fellowships to the institution, and it’s the group too that we tend to draw Senior Fellows from. I mean, when we select Senior Fellows we try to find people who we believe are aware of and sympathetic to work in both areas. I mean, each will be a specialist in one or the other, Mesoamerica or the Andes, but we want to, on the Senior Fellows, draw people in who have demonstrated an interest and a sympathy and some knowledge, not just in their own area but in the other area as well.

EG: So, aside from selecting other Senior Fellows, what are some of the other roles and responsibilities that you have as a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks?

GU: Well, the main thing you do as a Senior Fellow is that you work together to read and evaluate applications for fellowships and make recommendations then to the Director for fellowships for the program. So, that’s the main work. Well, I would say that that’s one of the two or three main tasks that we do. I mean, that’s the one that is the most demanding in terms of, like, every year we receive something on the order of say a hundred-ish fellowship applications, that’s for senior fellowships and junior fellowships and project grants and summer grants. So, they have a lot of applications to read all with their project descriptions and letters of recommendation from different scholars. And the six – I think we’re six Senior Fellows, I’m not exactly sure – plus the Director of Studies, we all read those and then we meet at the January meeting, meet in January and make the selections of the candidates who will be recommended. We also have discussions in our meetings, our two annual meetings, to talk about symposia. So, to accept applications for future symposia and then to work to help shape those symposia to try to improve them one way or another, to make recommendations for people who might be included on the part – who might be considered by the symposiarchs, the ones who’re organizing the symposia, for people they might consider. So, those are really the mains tasks, really, is to select the fellows for recommendation and to give attention to the organization of symposia. There are other tasks as well. We’re responsible for being cognizant of and being there to advise the Director of the program in Pre-Columbian Studies on matters having to do with publications and collections et cetera. But being on the Senior Fellows is to me one of the most fulfilling and enriching academic experiences I’ve been involved in. I mean, we’ve always had – to a person – we’ve always had people who are serious and who are committed and who are very collegial in terms of their approach to things. I mean, I’ve never experienced a moment when I felt that there was a kind of partisanship or a kind of special pleading or special interest on the part of any of the Senior Fellows. I mean we really are all – there’s just a sort of sense, sort of understanding, a sense of mission, like a sort of spirit of the objective of the Senior Fellows that is built around the notion that we are all in this together, supporting Pre-Columbian Studies in general to the best of our abilities. And so it’s been a very, very rewarding experience.

EG: Have there been any particularly memorable discussions or projects that you’ve worked on, on the Senior Fellow committee?

GU: Well, I don’t think, Elizabeth, there's anything that I can – that strikes me as having been – there were long conversations a few years ago when there was the suggestion that we might direct a certain amount of our resources to the support of a particular institution in Central America. So, this was a Costa Rican university, and the proposal was to have a professorship at that university that was supported by Dumbarton Oaks for which we would solicit proposals from American scholars. We would select a scholar; that person then would go there and spend the year and contribute to teaching and research et cetera. And there were long discussions over that and that ran on for quite some time. In the end we tried the experiment for a few years and then we brought it to an end. Most things don’t run – most issues that arise don’t run over that long a period of time. It tends to be very – each year has its focus and has its set of obsessions and it has its crop of applicants that come in and has its issues concerning symposium proposals, but those sort of work their way through. And I think that – well let me just – there’s one other time that I can recall when we did have certain concerns that went over multiyear and that concerned the construction of the new library, which of course consumed a lot of the effort and energy of the institution as a whole, of all of the Senior Fellows, and certainly of Ned Keenan who was then the Director, and it involved a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of coordination among the various Directors of Studies. And we on the Senior Fellows then were aware of all that, so that went over several years. It was another long-term issue. And in relation to that, then, we also had conversations on the Senior Fellows about long term goals of the program, given that we were in a time of transitions which we clearly were, and given that at least in those days economically the institution was very well off. This was before the crash of 2008 or ’9 whatever we’re now living through under more straightened circumstances. But when the institution was pretty flush with funds we were encouraged by Ned Keenan then to think about where we wanted to take the program in the future and the Senior Fellows had very productive discussions about where we wanted to go. It ended up in our case – I think we ended up getting another Fellow or two or approval for the appointment of another Fellow or two. So, the way this works is that each one of the programs has a generally understood number of fellowships that it can offer each year, and in general the Senior Fellows are intent on maintaining that number if not increasing it, so this potentially puts some tension into the world of the relations between the Director and the Directors of Studies in terms of the press for more resources coming from one or the other or all of the different programs. But at that time, as I say, we were encouraged to think long-term about how we would like to see our particular program develop, and we had very interesting conversations then about what we would do with more fellowships and how we would develop the program, what kinds of potential resources we might focus on. So, for instance, that was the time when we came up with the idea of trying to solicit donations of archival collections of materials. In fact I just have a note for myself of one that I have to write the Director about to promote. So, scholars out there who have spent a lifetime working in this area or that, like working with this kind of pottery or working on textiles or whatever, and as they near retirement, then, each scholar will have a rich store of resources and usually those are not passed on to heirs because family members sell them or aren’t terribly interested in that. They usually go to libraries, they go to various institutions, and to the extent that we can solicit archival materials in the form of photographs or notes from the field or whatever, that strengthens the position of Dumbarton Oaks as a place that holds significant resources for all kinds of studies. So, during the time I’m talking about, which was the late ’90s or so, we determined that we wanted to increase our efforts to try to hold onto that material. This relates to the fact that a generation of scholars, those scholars who came into major positions in large research institutions in the ’40s and ’50s were retiring. Of course we’ll have another round of that when the baby boomers, when people my age begin to retire in five to ten years or whatever. So, we wanted to have ourselves positioned well, that we could take advantage of, or we would be in a position to receive, to get our hands on, some of those resources that could strengthen Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: You’re currently the chair of the Senior Fellows committee, is that right?

GU: Yep.

EG: Do you have any sorts of different responsibilities as the chair?

GU: No, not really. I coordinate more closely – I mean, I spend time talking to the Director of Studies more than the other Senior Fellows do. She and I, Joanne and I, talk about the agenda for the meetings. We talk about – there are various issues that come up on a maybe monthly basis, things that’s she’s working on, concerned with, and she and I will talk but that mostly has to do with advice, conversations in which we consult each other. And then we work together to set the agenda for the meetings as well. So, there are conversations and there’s some general concern with matters going on at Dumbarton Oaks that I’m involved in as chair that I was not involved in as a member of the Senior Fellows. But it’s not an onerous workload. It’s just mostly chairing the meeting.

EG: Have you had much interaction with the Junior Fellows or the other visiting scholars during your time as a Senior Fellow, or is it more separate?

GU: We used not to have any formal interaction scheduled between the Senior Fellows and the people who were holding fellowships in any one year, but a few years ago we started a practice of when we had our meeting in January, when we went for the meeting to select the next year’s Fellows, that we would always have a dinner with the Fellows from that year, from the current year. And we also, I think, got better at making sure that the Fellows attended the speaker’s dinner for the fall symposium. And so those gave at least two opportunities when the Senior Fellows could make contact with the people who had received the fellowships, because when I first did this, so back in the mid-’90s or so, we didn’t have that many occasions when we actually met. So, one could, you know, you could be involved in the selection of Fellows and never actually meet the Fellows when you were there. So, I think it’s a much more sensible and productive system the way we have it now, with more interaction. So, we can actually talk to the people and get a sense of how their work’s going. And usually this just amounts to patting ourselves on the back, that, yes, we chose the right people and aren’t they doing wonderfully?

EG: And so, how did you come to hold the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies here at Harvard? How did you get that position and what does that entail exactly?

GU: Well, it is an endowed chair. So, Harvard and other major universities are full of endowed chairs. It means that that’s a position that has been funded by an individual or by an institution, and so your position within the academic institution is linked to the support that derives from that institution. So, in my own case Ned Keenan, who was the director in the ’90s – this is the story that was told to me, he didn’t communicate this to me directly – but he was very interested in the work I had been doing on the quipus. I was at that time a professor at Colgate University. He became aware of the work I was doing and I also then, at the end of the ’90s, I was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and that gains one a fair amount of notoriety, did at the time, still seems to today. So, my work received a fair amount of press and I enjoyed a somewhat higher profile in academics. And so during this period when, again, the institution was fairly flush and wanted to expand its influence in the area of pre-Columbian studies in American institutions, that was when Ned Keenan sought the establishment of Dumbarton Oaks professorships – so two here for my own position and for Tom Cummins’ position. So, Tom was the first professor of Pre-Columbian art at Harvard, and then in my position, Dumbarton Oaks’s support allowed the establishment of this position. And that then for the first time in many years put an archaeologist or person interested in South American culture into this department and there hadn’t been anyone since, permanent at least, since Gordon Willey was here – but of course his interests – he was both a Mesoamericanist and an Andeanist. So, I would say it was in general the high profile that I enjoyed mostly by virtue of having received a MacArthur Fellowship and at that same time an interest on the part of the Director of Dumbarton Oaks itself to strengthen Dumbarton Oaks’s links to academic institutions in those fields that were its mission to support: landscape architecture, Byzantine studies, and pre-Columbian studies. But what it means here – it doesn’t mean that much here my having that position except that I have the position, right? So, I mean, it’s a tenured professorship and so I enjoy the benefits of having an endowed chair. I get to pursue research and work with graduate students and in this case then also to maintain close links with Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: Is there any relationship between the professorship and Dumbarton Oaks that’s specified?

GU: The main link is that there’s an understanding that every other sabbatical year, so that would be every six years, it’s expected that I will take a sabbatical and go to Dumbarton Oaks, which is a great benefit of course. But other than that, unless I’m on the Senior Fellows, there’s no formal ongoing link between myself and my own activities here at Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks. As it turns out though, as a member of the Senior Fellows and as a chair of the Senior Fellows I spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about Dumbarton Oaks in one way or another, interacting with the staff of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: Have you had a lot of interaction with the staff of, say, Byzantine Studies or Garden and Landscape Studies, or are the groups all fairly separate?

GU: Well, it seems to me they tend to be fairly separate, and I have colleagues here at Harvard who are in Byzantine studies. I don’t really know any of the people in landscape architecture. I regret that, but I just don’t know any of them. And here at Harvard I know a couple of the people. I knew Angeliki Laiou, of course, and I know Ioli Kalavrezou who’s a Dumbarton Oaks Professor in Byzantine Studies. And I think those are the – I didn’t know Jan before he became Director of Dumbarton Oaks. I’ve since gotten to know him, he’s a great guy, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know him and learning about his work, but I didn’t know him here at Harvard. And that partially has to do with the brief time I had been here. I had only been here I think about four or five years or so before he became Director. So, I think that’s something that’s always been of concern to anybody that cares about Dumbarton Oaks is that there’re these three great programs, but there tend to be sort of tenuous connections among the personnel away from the institution. I know at Dumbarton Oaks itself the Directors of Studies are intimately involved in each other’s work, they have meetings together et cetera, but I think in terms of, say, the Senior Fellows there’re no formal and persistent links and ways of bringing together the people who are concerned in the three different programs.

EG: Have you found any of the resources at Dumbarton Oaks particularly useful such as the library or the museum and the collections – you mentioned some archival documents – and those types of things?

GU: I am aware that there are many things in the library that I would like to look at, that I would like to work with, but I haven’t made the arrangements to go down to D.O., say, and spend a long weekend or a month or something like that. I mean, the resources here with the Tozzer Library, of course, are very good. I mean there’s the odd article or book or dissertation that’s at Dumbarton Oaks that’s not at the Tozzer, but I tend just to throw up my hands in frustration rather than to write it down and take it down and then go down there at some point and study them. So, I’d say that I haven’t taken advantage of access to the collections or the library to the degree that I probably should have, and that would’ve been of great interest and benefit to my work. So no, I’ve not done that. Just out of laziness mostly.

EG: So, you have a unique position as the Dumbarton Oaks Professor at Harvard. I was wondering if you have any sense of the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard and whether that’s changed in the time that you’ve been associated with it.

GU: Well, no, I’m not aware of that. I mean I think it has, and I hope you have a chance to – I hope you’re talking to people like Ned Keenan. He’s a wonderful guy, of course, who knows Harvard intimately, served as dean of the graduate school and chair of his department and a person who knew Harvard inside and out, and served as director of Dumbarton Oaks for some ten years or something like that I believe, and served as director during a fairly critical time and was the one really responsible for planning the construction of the library and really transformed the institution with that library and with his placing of Dumbarton Oaks professors in different universities around the Northeast mostly. But as a faculty member, I at least just try to keep my head above water in what I’m doing and I’m not so intimately involved at a, sort of, institutional and structural level of the relationship between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks. Again, not just Ned Keenan, but I think in terms of the relationship between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks vis-à-vis pre-Columbian studies Bill Fash would, of course, be – I don’t know if you’ve talked to Bill or if you are talking to him – but he as a member of the board of Dumbarton Oaks here at Harvard and having served as chair of the Senior Fellows, I mean, he has intimate knowledge of all that and I wouldn’t presume to talk about all of that.

EG: So, you mentioned the different directors that you’ve worked with, Angeliki Laiou and Ned Keenan and now Jan Ziolkowski. Could you talk about your relationship with the directors and if you noticed any changes in Dumbarton Oaks through the different directorships?

GU: Well, each had their interests and their personalities and their obsessions and their particular manners and ways of going about things. Angeliki I found was very supportive of our program. I don’t think she knew a whole lot in fact about pre-Columbian studies, but I always found her very supportive of our work and of the program. She was rather more formal than Ned Keenan, just sort of ran a more formal dinner and meeting and institution when she was there. Ned I found sort of a bit more folksy, more laid back, but really smart in terms of his thinking about and his ability to work with and around institutions from Dumbarton Oaks itself and its various parts, the library and the collections and the different programs of study, and Harvard. My sense from Ned was that one of the main duties of the director was to see to and care and nurture the endowment, the fund. And at times that meant hiding it from Harvard, and so you had to know actually how to do that. You had to know not only where the bodies were buried but you had to be prepared to bury them yourself at times. And I mean that’s one aspect that I only saw from a great distance and on the surface, but I realize that it’s a real part of the concerns of the director, is that it’s a whole lot of money they have and Harvard at various times needs all the money it can get its hands on and it is the parent institution. So, I think just inherently there’s a potential tension there, a sort of cat-and-mouse game potentially between the mother ship here at Harvard and the little pod down there in Washington. And so that’s one of the challenges that I think each director faces. Plus they face then the challenge of wanting to support all three of the programs, wanting to keep the facilities, obviously, the grounds in ideal conditions. And plants are always dying and program directors are always insisting on more resources so there are all those challenges. And Angeliki had her way of managing those and Ned his, and, it seems to me, Jan, a different way. But I don’t really know Jan well enough to be able to characterize his style. I really enjoy being with him and I have enjoyed all the conversations I’ve had with him and I think he’s done a great job since he’s come in, but I don’t know his particular style well enough to differentiate it and characterize it vis-à-vis either Angeliki or Ned. Did I sufficiently waffle on that one?

EG: On the same note, have you noticed differences in the goals or the mission of the Directors of Pre-Columbian Studies, so Elizabeth Boone, Jeffery Quilter, Joanne Pillsbury – any major differences during their terms?

GU: No, I don’t think so. Of course, each of those has their own interests, so Elizabeth is a Mesoamericanist and Jeff and Joanne are Andeanists, but one thing I’ve always been impressed with through all the directors – and I knew Elizabeth Benson before Elizabeth Boone as well, it goes back that far – I think that each one of the directors that has come in has been really sensitive about promoting work in the two major areas that are supported by Pre-Columbian Studies, so Mesoamerica and the Andes. And one needs to be aware, and if you’re not aware you’re made aware very quick after you become Director of Studies, that you’re being watched by the great constituency out there and if they feel that you’re directing more resources to one area or the other, gossip starts percolating through the community of scholars interested in it. I know that we have been aware of this on the Senior Fellows. We’ve thought about the potential implications if in one year, say, we’re giving more fellowships to people in Mesoamerica than the Andes or vice-versa, but we’ve never in any manner established a quota system that, you know, we must have x number of Andeans and y number of Mesoamericans at a minimum. I mean, it may very well be the best proposals that come in are all for work in Mesoamerica. If so, they’ll all go to Mesoamericanists. I think that’s something that we have to do, but then we are also aware that on the outside world, people perceiving the degree of support from Dumbarton Oaks for this or that field, that there may be some consternation if they think that one of the areas is benefiting perhaps to the exclusion or the potential detriment of the other. So, it is a concern and that’s one of the main challenges I think for the director is that when they come in they will each be expert in their field, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten where they are. But immediately then they are challenged with the need to support work in all areas in the two major areas that are funded, that are supported by Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: More broadly, what do you see as the role of Dumbarton Oaks in pre-Columbian studies or, more specifically, in Andean studies?

GU: Well, in general I think Dumbarton Oaks has a unique place. It’s one of the only places in the country that has as its mission – and here I’m talking about pre-Columbian studies. I mean, I think this is true for Byzantine and for landscape architecture. In each one of the three areas, in that area it’s one of the few institutions in the country that has a significant program of support for scholars working at the highest level. In pre-Columbian studies it has a unique reputation as a place that has extraordinary resources and that regularly makes them available to the community of scholars working in this area, through fellowships, through summer workshops, through a whole variety of means, making funds available, making resources available to scholars. I think it has a really important position in the life and certainly in the mentality of people working in this field. I mean, I know I have a close relationship with Dumbarton Oaks myself so I hope I’m not just blinded by that and am misperceiving what the role of the institution is more generally, how it’s perceived, but I think that it’s fair to say that is has a very important position. In terms of Andean studies, I mean, again, I think what’s said about pre-Columbian studies in general goes doubly for the Andes. I mean, there’s no other place where the Andes is a major area of concern by a major American institution, and that is the case for Dumbarton Oaks. I think one would have to say that for Mesoamerica as well, I mean each one of those areas, but in particular Mesoamerica because Mesoamerica tends to be the area of classic pre-Columbian Mesoamerican studies because they have the Maya and they have a writing system. And there are more small institutions funding research and funding development of Mesoamerican studies, but nonetheless none equals the resources nor the continued level of support for Mesoamerican studies represented by Dumbarton Oaks. So, I think it has been a critical institution in the development of pre-Columbian studies in the Americas from the ’60s to the present day, and as far as I can see it’s poised to continue to promote and sponsor work in those three areas far into the future, hopefully as long as its endowment holds up, which we hope will be a very long time.

EG: Do you see the role changing at all in the future?

GU: Well, we know that the fields themselves are going to change. I mean, we know that talking in terms of pre-Columbian studies there will be changes in methods of study but there will also be changes in relations between the American academy and American institutions linked to Dumbarton Oaks and those Latin American nation-states which are the homes of the territories, the sites, and the collections that are the focus of pre-Columbian studies. And that’s a very dynamic and potentially unpredictable and changeable world. That is, the world that presents itself out there in terms of how Dumbarton Oaks manages its relations with the nation-states and the scholars in the those various nation states that are the homes of the archaeological sites and the museum collections that we’re interested in. So, that can go in any number of ways but that will be a sort of forum, a little motor of change and transformation that exists within the inherent structure of the Pre-Columbian Studies program that may lead to changes that I can’t foresee now. But I suspect that there will be transformations, new kinds of relationships between D.O. and those various countries and scholars in those various countries. That’s the sort of general sense in which I see potential changes in the future because I don’t think that it’s going to remain static, that it’s going to be exactly as it was. It will change, it will transform and that will be one of the forces of change in the future.

EG: Well, I think you’ve answered all of my questions. Do you have anything else that you’d like to add?

GU: Like hidden secrets? No, I can’t think of anything else. I was just thinking I’ve just about talked myself out. There you go – all very good questions. I enjoyed the conversation.

EG: Thank you for talking with me today, this is great.

GU: After all, there was an hour’s worth of talking.

]]>No publisherMesoamericanAndeanPre-Columbian StudiesSenior FellowOral History ProjectSymposium2013/09/05 13:50:00 GMT-4PageJustin and Barbara Kerrhttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/justin-and-barbara-kerr
Oral History Interview with Justin and Barbara Kerr, undertake by Joshua Wilson and James Curtin on the telephone on July 19, 2013. Justin and Barbara Kerr recently decided to donate their photographic archive to the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) of Dumbarton Oaks in order that it will remain available to any and all researchers in perpetuity.JW: My name is Joshua Wilson, I’m here with James Curtin, and today, Wednesday, July 19, 2013, we have the great pleasure of interviewing Barbara and Justin Kerr about their relationship with Dumbarton Oaks over the years. Thanks so much for being with us, Barbara.

BK: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re very welcome.

JW: So, we understand that you and Justin were involved in theater photography, fashion photography and the like, before you actually transitioned to photographing pre-Columbian objects in the late 1950s, is that right?

BK: Yes, that’s correct. Actually, we both got interested in pre-Columbian stuff and little by little transitioned into that and dropped a lot of our other business.

BK: Actually, it was a trip that Justin and I did, to Chichen Itza – actually our first trip to Mexico. And we just walked into the site one morning and were totally blown away. We were just entranced, and said, “We’ve got to find out what this is all about.” And that’s what got us started on this kind of crazy journey of getting interested in the material and the people and, you know, all the other stuff that goes with it. Actually, I can’t even explain it, but something came over both of us at the same time, which was very fortunate.

JW: Do you remember any objects in particular that have stuck with you over the years, in memory, from that trip?

BK: From that trip, no. We just made a mad dash to go to as many sites as we could cram in.

JW: Okay.

BK: And that did it for us. The next year, we took a vacation and went right back, and, again, went to about nine different sites in our two weeks. I mean, it was just really kind of crazy, but we just felt we had to see everything quickly, and go to museums. And then we started to do some studying on our own, and we took some courses, and I think we just had an affinity for it or something.

JW: So, when and how did you come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?

BK: Well that started with, I guess – I’m trying to remember. [To Justin] Do you remember how long ago or when we got involved at Dumbarton Oaks? What was that first trip over there?

JK: This is Justin.

JW: Hi Justin, nice to speak with you.

JK: Hi. One of the first books that we bought during the first year that we were home was the rather large coffee-table book of the Dumbarton Oaks collection that was photographed by Nicolas Mouret. Of course, at the time, being photographers, I was absolutely fascinated with the techniques he used in that book. That kind of led us to Dumbarton Oaks, and we tried at the time to stay abreast of what was happening. We found that the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Pre-Columbian Collection, was on display at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and, as a matter of fact, there were some photographs of that exhibition and an article by Julie Jones in a recent book on the history of the Blisses and their connection with Dumbarton Oaks. In any case, we went down to Washington, and I then found out that Dumbarton Oaks was publishing a number of small volumes on various symposia that they had, which we started to buy and collect, and they’re still sitting on the bookshelves. That was probably our initial connection to Dumbarton Oaks, but in those years, as we started to photograph pre-Columbian objects, one of the dealers that we were photographing for was one of the dealers that was actively showing objects at Dumbarton Oaks. So, we were getting some sort of information back and forth in those years.

BK: Yeah, well, that was just another eye-opener in the sort of journey that we were on, and our customers, clients, whatever you would call them, were at that time mostly people who were gallery owners or collectors. We didn’t know anything about the business, as it’s so-called. It’s morphed into something completely different now, so that, with the website, and scholars, students, accessing it constantly, I feel truly that it changed the way of study, in that there was such a large sample available now, and that’s something they didn’t have before. So, if you were an epigrapher or studying the, you know, whatever, art history, you could go and look at thousands of vases, and sort of have – and it’s still not enough, but at least it was a background to start with. So, where were we in the question?

JK: We were – the question was, how did we get involved with Dumbarton Oaks. I guess I’m not sure of what year it was, but we did start to attend the symposia at D.O. and those days we would drive down, or drive down with somebody, and enjoy – I think that’s the right word, “enjoy” – enjoy the atmosphere at Dumbarton Oaks, and of course after some time we realized that many of the people that we knew were Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks, people that we worked with such as Mary Miller, David Joralemon, Michael Coe, and so forth and so on. And so there was always a kind of a connection to Dumbarton Oaks through those people.

JW: Do you remember any of your initial impressions of the institution?

BK: Well, I remember thinking that it was beautiful. It was like a beautiful piece of crystal, all the glass, Plexi- and, I mean, just the whole atmosphere of it was like looking at a beautiful sculpture and beautiful crystal. That was my first impression, and then, of course, looking at the objects – there were so many things that we had never seen before, and even the controversial ones became very interesting, like the birthing figure. But every piece there was an exciting thing, and much later on we photographed the Peruvian material. Unfortunately, we never got that involved with Peruvian material. We were mostly interested in Central American countries, and when we discovered the Maya we were really excited, because that’s the best painted pottery there is of all the cultures, most diversified and interesting, beautifully drawn. So, there’s no one object, is what I guess my answer would be. Oh, textiles, South American textiles: simply gorgeous!

JK: I know there was a question about which of the Dumbarton Oaks objects – and I think that for me that’s an absolutely impossible question to answer since each one of the objects brings its own particular personal story. And just to spend some time getting involved with a particular object doesn’t lend to saying, “Well, I like you better than I like this fellow over here,” because very often some insignificant little object all of a sudden carries an incredible story, and one doesn’t want to ignore those kinds of things. For example, there are some objects in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection with Maya hieroglyphs on them, and they were quote “J’s” at one point in time, but when the epigraphers started to be able to read the text, then these objects took on an entirely different significance. So, these kinds of things do happen. And of course that’s one of the areas that makes Dumbarton Oaks so very, very special, and that is the fellowship program, where you have people constantly either working with the Collection or working around the Collection, and enhancing the knowledge of everybody who is interested in the area.

BK: I was just looking at some things here, and talking about the rollout camera, and that was very exciting because – I should let Justin talk about that, since that’s his baby, but –

JK: Well, prior to the rollout camera, since we were making photographs for various collectors and dealers, at one point in time, one of the dealers asked us to make a three-dimensional poster of one of the vases to be distributed to collectors and museums and so forth and so on. And the problem was, of course, there was no rollout camera at the time, and we made a series of still photographs. Then Barbara made – I think, it must have been about twelve prints around various aspects of the vase. And then Barbara cut along various lines, pasted it all together, and that was one of the first rollouts that we had made, first photographic rollout. Then Barbara hand-colored it, re-photographed it, and we had it printed with tabs A and B, that go into slots A and B. And you did that and, by goodness, you had a three-dimensional vessel that you could put on the shelf. And I believe there’s still one or two lying, sitting on shelves in various museum offices in various parts of the country. However, it was terribly unsatisfactory, extremely time-consuming. It wasn’t 150% accurate. And in, I guess it was 1974 or 1975, 1972 –

BK: Yeah.

JK: – that – What?

BK: ’72.

JK: that I started on the Grolier show.

BK: Yeah. Somewhere around there.

JK: Somewhere – no, I think – well, somewhere around there, Michael Coe asked me to make the photographs for the catalogue of the Grolier show, which was essentially the very first major show using Maya vessels and dealing with the texts. And when that volume was finally finished and published, many of the vessels in that catalogue were presented with drawings, rollout drawings, of the vessels. And I felt that there had to be a better way, and so I started to explore the concept of – what was it called? – peripheral photography, photographing the outside of a cylinder. Michael Coe told me that there was a camera being used in England to photograph cores of the oil wells from the North Sea. I found there were some other details. I found, as a matter of fact, that a company in Chicago was making an attachment that was a peripheral device, but in inquiry they told me they weren’t doing it and wouldn’t. So, I started to put some parts together, and I think it was about two years later that I had the first prototype, essentially, of a rollout camera. And things progressed rather quickly after that, in that a very, very dear friend of ours, Gillette Griffin, who was curator of Pre-Columbian at the Princeton Art Index at the time, had acquired the vase that’s now known as the Princeton Vase, and they wanted to do a catalogue and a show to celebrate that acquisition. And Gillette called and said, “Is the rollout camera ready?” And I said yes. And after some discussion and so forth and so on, the very, very first volume called Lords of the Underworld, written by Michael Coe, published by the Princeton Art Museum, is essentially the very, very first book to be published with photographic rollouts. Other volumes, including a Dumbarton Oaks folio, had been published previously, but they were all drawings and watercolors rather than photographs, beautifully done to say, but the photograph is the hand of the artist. It’s not a copy of – in other words, I felt somehow that scholars would want to look at the specific hand of the original painter rather than the hand of a contemporary painter who was copying the Maya painter. And so, it kind of grew like Topsy, in that, after Lords of the Underworld, a gentleman by the name of Pearlman also had a collection that he wanted published, and again Michael Coe wrote the text. We did the rollouts, Harvard designed the book, and there was still another book. Then there was Francis Robicsek, who published a book on the codex vases, and all the rollouts in that volume were also ours. And so all of a sudden – and that was how it started.

JW: Could you describe the process of photographing D.O.’s Pre-Columbian Collection?

BK: [To Justin] Could we describe the process of photographing D.O.’s collection?

JK: Well we have really never photographed the D.O. collection in its entirety. We only photographed a few objects. We have rolled out all of the – no, that’s not 100% true – we rolled out, I guess, 90% of the cylinder vases in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection over time. They weren’t all done at the same time. As a matter of fact, I think the last one was only done about two years ago. It was – I think we must have been away at the time we were doing the rollouts, so we never got to do it. So, we came – we were invited to come down – and it was done at that point. And then we’ve also photographed a few other objects in the Collection, but the vast majority of the photographs of the Dumbarton Oaks material is done by the Dumbarton Oaks photographer.

JW: We understand you that used some distinctive methods and techniques in addition to the rollout. For example, you transitioned from film to digital photography; you use five lights when you’re photographing for a dramatic effect, it might be called. Could you tell us a little bit about those choices?

JK: Yes. Once I – we really got involved in and photographing the pre-Columbian material – I began to wonder how the original artist saw the object, and could I somehow make a photograph that would emulate that? And I realized that that was absolutely impossible, but I would generally study each object and try and bring something to it which would allow it to be studied, but at the same time to enhance whatever could be enhanced. And it’s been pretty successful. I know the photographs have been emulated by a number of much, much younger photographers over time, and I say “successful” in that I don’t know at this particular point in time how many volumes have been illustrated with the photographs that we’ve done, but they are numerous. And, as a matter of fact, just the other day the latest, the newest volume, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court by Mary Miller and Cody Brittenham arrived, which is chockfull of our photographs. We’re very, very proud of that particular project. So, that’s – but it’s difficult to explain in that sometimes it’s almost a sense-thing, that you see the object in front of the camera and you want to know more about it, want to say, how can I enhance this? And beyond that I don’t think I can explain it very well.

BK: Well, I can add to that, that people have said when they go through a book they could always immediately recognize Justin’s photographs because they are dimensional, they live in space, whereas the other photographs are usually a little textbooky-looking, sort of flat. [To Justin] So, that’s what by five lights he meant, [To JW and JC] because most photographers, when they have to go on location, will carry two or three lights at most. But we have always used – wherever we needed highlighting and background lightning, we always used many more lights than that. So, that was my part of that.

JW: Maybe you could give us an example of an object that you saw and the thought-process that you went through in determining how best to bring it into three dimensions, to make it live in space, as Barbara says.

BK: It’s a spur of the moment thing, I mean –

JK: For one thing, on the website, mayavase.com, right now there are close to two thousand – aside from the rollouts, in portfolio – there are about somewhere around two thousand individual photographs. Each one is a unique situation, each one was put down in front of the camera, studied, moved, turned, twisted – not twisted, that’s wrong – but turned, lit, and tried in a certain sense, to bring it to life, to give it dimension, to give it space and a kind of a personality. Again, it’s a very difficult area to explain. I think one would have to be a poet in order to really explain the photographer’s attitude towards the object.

JW: Right.

JK: It’s one of the reasons I’ve essentially stayed away from photographing paintings. Many many, many, many times I’ve been asked to do that. I’ve said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do that, because I don’t feel that I can express myself photographing a flat object, it just doesn’t – there’s nothing there.” You just light it and shoot it.

JW: So, that’s what drew you to the Maya vases in particular – because they allowed you to better express yourself?

BK: Well, that would be, I’d say, the other objects. I think what drew us to the Maya vases was the fact that they were – that they told a story, they had writing on them, even if we couldn’t understand it at the time. But they had writing. The only culture in Mesoamerica that employed writing, or maybe the Zapotec?.

JK: There may be some writing on the Zapotec vessels. But it’s iffy; and there may be some writing on Teotihuacan vessels, but that’s a little iffy. But once I started to do the rollouts, the vessels, the Maya vessels, became a true passion, and – again I can’t remember the year – but in the fourth year of Linda Schele’s long workshops, which go back a very, very long time, she asked me to lead a workshop in the study in the iconography of the paintings and the carvings and the incising on Maya vessels. And I really can’t come up, but I think that went on for about twenty-six years, and just this past January was another, was probably the last workshop at the Maya Meetings in Austin following through with Linda Schele’s original goal. So, the vessels, aside from the photography of them, became more than that. They were objects to be studied and lots to be learned about, essentially about the ancient Maya, because the stone monuments are one story, and the physical sites themselves are another story, and the vessels that were buried with the Maya – and that’s what most of them were – are still an additional story. And we have learned – when I say we, I mean the community of Mayanists who’ve learned an enormous amount about the society from the study of these vessels.

JW: So, based on the research in preparation for this interview, we learned that you had composed many volumes on Maya vases and you had also compiled an online database, which you’ve mentioned. How do you think these resources can be best utilized by scholars?

JK: Well, as I said, since I was doing these workshops once a year at the Maya meetings, the word about the vessels and the rollouts started to get around. But there was at that particular time no way to distribute them except the batches that I would bring with me to Austin, which were Xeroxed by the dozens. And scholars, people like David Stuart and Nikolai Grube and Steve Houston, would come to the studio here in New York and go through the volumes, anything new and so forth and so on, and make copies here and so forth. Then one day I said to Barbara or Barbara said to me, it’s hard to remember, “Maybe we ought to start publishing,” because all there was at the time was the Princeton book The Lords of the Underworld, the Pearlman book, Old Gods and Young Heroes, and the Robicsek book. And so we put together some money and published Volume I of the Maya Vase Book series. It was very successful, and we were then able to publish Volume II and so forth and so on, up until we finished volume VI. By the time we finished Volume VI, mayavase.com was already online, and most people were using the online database rather than the printed volumes, although every once and a while we still get a call for someone who would like one of the physical books. And the online database, mayavase.com, I think now is somewhere in the vicinity of one eighteen hundred rollouts, and they are, I think, constantly accessed by scholars and interested laypeople all over the world. I’m amazed at some of the queries that we get from various parts of the world. There’s been a book printed in China, a book printed in Japan, a book printed in Norway, and so forth and so on. So, the database has become a tool for Maya scholars that is, I think, unparalleled anywhere else. And I hope, of course, that, it will continue to live in the – I guess it’s called the Cloud these days, or cyberspace.

JW: The Cloud I guess. Hey, y’all still there?

JK: Oh sure, we’re still here.

JW: So, have you gotten any feedback from scholars about your photographs?

BK: That’s a constant thing. Well, the rollouts, they are what they are.

JW: Right.

JK: The rollouts are – Barbara, that’s a very good line – the rollouts are what they are. Naturally, there are some vessels that get a lot more attention than other vessels because they’re either more spectacular or they have what some scholars feel is more information than others. However, my feeling has always been that even a minor vessel needs to be available – when I say minor vessel: say, something with just two figures on it, or something of that nature – because there is always the possibility that it will be meaningful for somebody’s thesis or master’s thesis or even a high school paper. And so, that is why I felt that I wanted to record every single vessel that came along.

BK: I tend to sometimes question his choices. I’ll say, “Oh, that is a really ugly thing, or completely battered,” and I tend to like the aesthetically beautiful things. But Justin will say, “But there’s information on it that somebody may be able to use, so therefore it’s valuable.” So these decisions kind of go in between those two ideas. But I’m happy with what’s been put up on the Web. I think it’s all important enough, certain people will find certain things they want and look for.

JK: I’m constantly being asked if I have a vessel hidden away for whatever reason, and my answer is absolutely not. If it’s been rolled out and I think it’s real, it’s on the Web, or in the Vase Books. But at this particular point every single rollout that we’ve done is on the Web and accessible, so there’s nothing hidden. It has always been our philosophy that nothing is to be hidden; that scholars and laypeople alike should have access to all of the information. I know that there has been criticism over the years: “Well, we can’t publish because we don’t know everything about it yet,” and so forth and so on, and let’s get it out there and see what it really means, or what somebody thinks about it. And in many, many cases, of course, scholars have been wrong and have had to correct themselves, or other people have corrected them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s part of the ongoing scholarship. There’s always some new take, some new way, of looking at material, of studying it, and I’m not necessarily talking about scientific methodology, which also of course is very useful when, for example, when archaeologists began to use carbon-14 dates, it changed the picture enormously. And so, yes, that’s part of it. But it’s also the study, and the trying-to-determine the specifics sometimes, of what a particular character or drawing – what that actually represents. Professor Karl Taube – many, many times the public has said, the way he puts it, that, “without Justin’s database I couldn’t do my work,” because this is essentially become – I don’t want to say the source, but to some people it is. I was having breakfast some months ago with Steve Houston of Brown University, and he said, “Hey, you know Justin,” he says, “almost every single day, I go to mayavase.com and look up something and check out something,” so when I hear something like that of course it makes me and Barbara feel that all of the years and time and effort that we’ve put into this is worthwhile.

BK: Definitely.

JK: I need a drink of water, I’ve talked too much. Barbara, you take over.

JW: So, you’ve recently promised a gift of your archives to Dumbarton Oaks, the so-called, Kerr Photographic Archive. Could you tell us why you decided to donate this collection to Dumbarton Oaks as opposed to somewhere else?

BK: We agonized over where it should go. We rejected museums largely because museums aren’t always the best study place for people to go and study material in-depth; and we rejected universities because things are changing and they will always have new people messing around and changing the database. And we selected Dumbarton Oaks because we felt that that was a true scholarly organization where true scholars would use the materials to the fullest extent that was possible. But we also made a stipulation, that we want the database to continue being online and to be accessible to everybody, and I hope that that will be fulfilled, because I think that’s the important function that it has, not stashed away in some secret basement room. So, we’re hoping that that will, because having that sample does accelerate the study, and that’s the important part of all this.

JK: One of the problems essentially with an archive in an institution means that scholars have to go to that institution: it means them either getting a grant or finding the time, and so forth and so on, whereas when it’s online all they have – I’m assuming that everybody’s got a computer these days, and an internet connection – all they do is sit down and do the research that way. In the database, there are lots of – I shouldn’t say lots of – there are many articles that are connected directly to a vessel with interpretations by various people, and so we’ve had contributions to the database from the very best minds in the field. And, again, that’s online for people to study. I’ve always felt that scholars who hold things back aren’t really fulfilling their duty, so to speak.

JW: Right.

JK: Yeah.

BK: I’ll agree with that.

JK: Huh?

BK: I said, I’ll agree with that.

JK: Okay, fine. Good.

JW: Could you tell us about the people you’ve worked most closely with at Dumbarton Oaks?

BK: Well, Joanne Pillsbury of course, when she was there, because she’s the person that we contacted to see whether there was any interest in our giving –

JK: And Emily Jacobs.

BK: – yeah, in our giving the archive. And Emily Jacobs.

JK: And Juan Antonio.

BK: Juan Antonio Murro.

JK: And Rona.

BK: Oh, that’s recent.

JK: That’s recently, yes, right, yeah.

BK: The archiver.

JK: And, oh well, when he was here –

BK: And Dylan.

JK: And Dylan, of course, yes.

BK: Otherwise, aside from – really Joanne and Emily were instrumental in our, you know, in making our decision and contacting them. I was really gratified because Joanne called back almost immediately after she got my letter and said yes, so that saved me a lot of work of looking for other places. D.O. was the place of choice, and it worked out beautifully, so, we’re happy. I assume everybody will be.

JW: So, we’re coming to the end of the interview. We’ve got a couple more questions just to clarify some of the things that have been discussed and to bring up some points that aren’t necessarily related with Dumbarton Oaks but that are important to your identities as photographers of Mayan objects. So, for example, we understand that, in addition to photographing objects, you also restore them. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the interplay between those two facets of your professional life?

BK: Yeah, I started to do some restoration – I was never trained in restoration, but I have had art training, so, you know, I know paints and colors and all that stuff. And ironically, I learned because people requested it, and I had to learn. The first thing I did was – the dealer gave me a small bowl, and said, “Can you restore this?” It was broken. And I said, “I don’t know, I’ve never done this before.” And he said, “Oh it’s not that hard, just do it.” And I did. And the same thing happened with – I do some graphic art, graphic design – and the same thing happened there with Ed Merrin at the Merrin Gallery; he asked me to design a poster, and at that point I said, “I’ve never designed a poster,” and he said, “Just do it.” So, I did. And that’s how so many things happened, because it forces you to look into what’s required, and you just do it, and it was like second-nature to me. So, I did restoration for quite a few years, up until quite recently, when there’s not the demand any longer, nor is the money available to museums and galleries to spend it on restoration. So, you get a couple really bad jobs done in-house, so to speak, that didn’t come out of my hands. The way it related to the photography side of things is that, often, if they were objects we wanted to have for the databases, either one of them, and we asked the owner whether it was okay for us to put it on the web, and usually they’d say yes. And we’d tell them that whatever we photograph we copyright and we make it available if necessary. Very few people have objected to that idea. A couple have, but they always give in, maybe because they can’t get rollouts anywhere else. But they usually agree to our thinking on that. And Justin would photograph a lot of things for me, before-and-after photographs, stuff like that. So, we kind of interacted. And I was doing styling when we were doing the really commercial photographs, so I was always available to run out and get props and things. And I think that’s the way we interact mostly. Wouldn’t you say, Justin?

JK: Yeah. One of the things that Barbara did was to learn Photoshop and do some restoration right on the picture of the vessel rather than on the vessel itself, and of course this is very pleasing to a lot of scholars, since they feel that the original should always stay untouched. But, at the same time, when you do restoration of a vessel, it enhances it very often, and it makes it easier to study and so forth and so on. So, for example, there’s a vessel that was excavated from Burial 165 at Tikal, which is online, and it’s the – when you see it, it’s all cracked and busted and awful. But there is a link right on the page and there is the retouched version, and it’s a much more beautiful, much, much easier to study, without all the interference of the broken lines.

BK: The problem is that you get restorers who are very good technically, but they don’t know Maya iconography or the writing, and very often you’ll see some pretty weird combinations of things because that’s what they thought it might look like. And you really need the individual knowledge. It would be like restoring Egyptian things without knowing the writing system, or without knowing how it looked. So, that’s the danger in restoration, and I think that’s what scholars worry about – is that they’re going to base some conclusions on somebody’s idea of what it should look like. I really pride myself on doing the research and knowing enough about it that I can do a very good job of not making up anything. If it has to be made up in total that way, it’s better not to do it. And that’s sort of what I follow.

JK: Yeah, no. So, I’m not sure you’re – but there are literally hundreds and hundreds of reproductions, fakes, floating around in the world, and sometimes people send us photographs of these things: “My father bought it in Guatemala forty years ago,” and things of that nature. And I have to say that in most cases they turn out to be spurious, and one has to be always on the alert in dealing with any kind of artifact, whether it’s a book or a manuscript, a vessel, from every culture. There has been this kind of stuff, and we kind of pride ourselves on the fact that we are able to recognize, in most cases, I would say within almost ninety-nine percentile, that we can spot that it’s quote “not right.”

BK: Or at least that much we can. Because we approach it from the viewpoint of what’s wrong with this, and a very careful, knowledgeable restorer can really fool you though.

JK: Oh, absolutely.

BK: There’s a big difference between restoration and making it up, because restoration means that you’re working with the original material pieces. And certainly the thing you don’t want to do is make up anything.

JK: In the forward to the Maya Vase Books, I have written, essentially addressed to scholars, that in looking at rollouts, if they feel that something is wrong, then let them follow their own feeling about it, because it may be wrong, I may have missed it, and so, that there is always a kind of warning out there: don’t take everything at face value. Study it; make sure you’ve got it right.

JC: Great. My name is James Curtin, I’ve been sitting in, and I was curious if you could briefly give us an overview of the mechanics of the rollout process, how you go about getting the photographs from the image to the page.

JK: Right. We’ve published essentially the technique in the first volume in Lords of the Underworld, but it’s fairly simple in that the vessel or in some cases the object, but we’ll talk about the vessel, sits on a turntable, and using a film camera, where the film is moving at the same speed as the surface of the vessel in the opposite direction, it essentially peals the image off the vessel and onto the film. It’s that simple and that complex at the same time. It’s really – I did not invent the process; the process has been known in the photography business, photography field, for a very, very long time. The very, very early photographers were extremely inventive. However, there was never any real use for the process. It was almost a kind of a situation where solid geometry was never used until somebody had to design a propeller, and the rollout, the peripheral photography, was not useful for anything –

BK: For cores.

JK: – except, yeah, for cores, but for recording the vessels it was almost the ideal situation.

BK: We’d end up with a negative of a strange proportion, because it had to be fairly long for a normal sized pot, and then that would get printed in the regular manner, like you print any other negative. In this case, they were positives. Or you send it directly to the printer and the printer would then make a plate and proceed like with any other ones. Of course, now, this is being done digitally. We don’t have a digital camera, but Justin is working on one. Now we just send the digital files to the printer, and presumably what we see on our computer they will see, because we calibrate constantly and assume that they are doing the same, so the results are very, very good. But that’s the whole process.

JW: So, we’re coming to the end of our hour together, and I was wondering if there’s anything that James and I have neglected to ask you about that you would like to discuss.

BK: [To Justin] Anything you’d like to discuss that we haven’t talked about?

JK: Oh, I guess the only thing we haven’t discussed is essentially the future. And, of course, when has not been decided as yet, as we explained at the meeting, the archive meeting that we had a few months ago. As long as Barbara and I have the strength to continue to operate the archive, we will do so, and when that doesn’t happen anymore, then the material will be moved to the archives at D.O. Of course, the whole concept today of moving into the digital age, which is moving so fast that sometimes it takes your breath away – and I realize that it is difficult in some senses for some institutions to catch up in a way, and a few libraries I know have allowed people to come in and digitize the entire thing. Of course, there always have to be protections, and so forth and so on, but the whole concept of moving forward digitally is something that’s absolutely necessary.

BK: I’d agree. That’s where it’s going.

JW: Well, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you both so much for your time.

BK: Well, thank you.

JK: Thank you.

BK: It’s been our pleasure.

]]>No publisherEpigraphyInscriptionMayaPublicationAndeanPre-Columbian CollectionImage Collections and Fieldwork ArchivesPre-ColumbianArchivesOnline2013/08/14 13:48:01 GMT-4PageBridget Gazzohttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/bridget-gazzo
Oral History Interview with Bridget Gazzo, undertaken by Joshua Wilson and James W. Curtin, with James N. Carder in attendance, in the Dumbarton Oaks Study on June 18, 2013. At Dumbarton Oaks, Bridget Gazzo has been the Librarian for Pre-Columbian Studies Program since 1987.JW: My name is Joshua Wilson and I am here with James Curtin. We have the great pleasure of interviewing Ms. Bridget Gazzo today, June 18, 2013, about her relationship with Dumbarton Oaks over the years. This is the second time this interview has been conducted due to a malfunction in the recording process. Welcome, Bridget. So, how did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?

BG: Well, I was hired in 1987. I started work here August 3, 1987. I had just come back from Ecuador when the position was advertised. I had been with the United States Information Agency for two years as a library fellow. I was called a library fellow, but not a research fellow like the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks. It was actually a contract position. Maybe later I’ll go into more detail about that, but I had the wonderful opportunity to work in our bi-national center libraries – three bi-national center libraries in Ecuador. And of course Ecuador is an Andean country, and I had greatly improved my Spanish. The position was a one-year contract, and we were able to renew it for a second year. And after that, I tried to renew it again, and they said, “No, no. You have to give someone else a chance.” So I came back to the Washington area, where I had lived before, and Dumbarton Oaks was advertising the position of Librarian for Pre-Columbian Studies. It required fluency in Spanish and a familiarity with Andean – or the cultures of Latin America. I saw the ad and three other people saw it and either called me about it – this was before the internet. Somebody mailed it to me. It was in the Washington Post, you know – we used to clip, and everybody would read the newspaper, and so people thought it was right for me. Then, I got an interview. That was interesting because Elizabeth Boone was on sabbatical that year. She was at the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton. She was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. The acting director was Janet Berlo. So, I came in for an interview with Janet Berlo, and then they had the short list come back and interview with Elizabeth a few weeks later. They brought Elizabeth down. I still remember a lot about those interviews because this place was just so amazing to me. And Elizabeth was great because she was real down to earth in the interview, so it was this contrast of – I remember I walked into the lobby and I didn’t know – and this is funny in retrospect – because I didn’t know if I was allowed to step on the mosaic on the floor. And you know, it turns out we probably shouldn’t have been allowed to step on the mosaic, but I stood at the entrance and asked the guard, “How do I get in?” And he said, “Just walk across.”

JW: So you mention that Dumbarton Oaks was an amazing place when you first got here. What were some of the things that contributed to that initial impression?

BG: The collections, because – well, the collections and then the people that I met. The library at that time did not – the Pre-Columbian Studies library was managed by the assistant curator of the collection. So, my first interview, I interviewed with Janet Berlo and I also interviewed with Gordon McEwan, who was the assistant curator of the collection. He is an archeologist. So, he took me through the museum and showed me the Pre-Columbian Collection and explained about the Blisses. I did not know anything about the Blisses. So, what was amazing – the house itself, the gardens. And to tell you the truth, even the experiences – the fieldwork of the people that I met, and they talked to me about their work. And also it was great – I had just come back from Quito and Gordon had done extensive work in the highlands of Peru, so meeting people here who knew so much about the Andes – it was funny too because at one time I felt comfortable with the people who knew all about the Andes and who spoke Spanish, but also it was all very exotic. Of course, the lifestyle of the Blisses was not something I had experienced before, and there was still evidence of the lifestyle of the Blisses. I remember when I met Irene Vaslef. I thought, “Oh, wow!” [To James Carder] I don’t know, did you ever meet Irene Vaslef, James?

JNC: I did.

BG: She was a character. She was the Director of the Byzantine Library. She was very welcoming. On the one hand, she was talking about OCLC and Library of Congress classification, but she seemed very exotic to me too – this older woman from Central Europe. So, that was it. It was a mix of feeling somewhat intimidated, and on the other hand very comfortable.

JW: So we’re going to shift gears a little bit and talk more about your professional role here at Dumbarton Oaks. Would you tell us what you know about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the Harvard University Libraries and how this relationship has changed since you’ve been here at Dumbarton Oaks?

BG: It’s changed greatly. When I first came, we operated very independently. We didn’t even use HOLLIS. We didn’t even use the system that was HOLLIS – it was called HOLLIS, but it was a different operating system. It was NOTIS, the NOTIS software. We didn’t even use that. When I came here, we didn’t even have an integrated library system. The other thing is – I don’t know if anyone else has said this in their interviews – but the three library collections operated independently. The library for Pre-Columbian Studies was physically separate and it was managed separately from the other two library collections. I reported – my position reported to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. That’s why Elizabeth Boone and Janet Berlo were interviewing me. There was not a central library administration. Each library staff – well for the most part – reported to the director of studies. The Byzantine library was a department, it was a part of Byzantine Studies, but Irene Vaslef was a department head, whereas I wasn’t, and my counterpart for Landscape Architecture was not. To tell you the truth, each of the three programs – in each of the three programs, the library collection and the library staff was handled a little differently in the organizational structure chart. So I worked – I have to go back and explain that when I was hired, the position for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies had just been created. Before me, the assistant curator was managing the library. I should probably talk a little about – this isn’t answering your question, but I’ll get to that later. I should probably talk a little bit about the library of Pre-Columbian Studies. It started out as Mr. Bliss’s personal library at about a little over two thousand books. And he donated it to Dumbarton Oaks. They had it organized by culture in what was then our rare book room, which – I don’t even know what is in that room now. But, in the Main House it’s a wood paneled room. It was open and it was next to what is now Jonathan Shea’s office and across from the men’s room. And that was our library. But that was before my time. All of the books fit in that one room, and they were not catalogued and they did not have Library of Congress classification or any other classification. They were organized by subject and within each subject, the subject being culture, and within each culture by author’s last name. And that worked fine for a couple years. They actually had Fellows – this was in the early 1980s – and even the Fellows were in that room. And then in 1981, Dumbarton Oaks received the bequest of Thelma Sullivan, who was an Aztec specialist. She was American, but she lived and worked in Mexico. She donated her books, her notes, her drafts of her publications – everything – to Dumbarton Oaks. At that time, the books were too many to fit in that room and to be organized – it was time to catalogue them properly and get them into something. But again, there wasn’t a librarian yet. So Elizabeth Boone wrote and got a NEH grant, and they hired a cataloger with that grant, and that was Michael Hamerly, and Michael Hamerly had a PhD in Latin American history. He came and worked – it was a grant for a two-year project. He worked for about eighteen months, and then he got a job on the West Coast. And I met him recently, about a year ago. It was nice to meet him at my Latin American Studies librarians’ conference. He did a great job. He catalogued the library, he used contract cataloguers for any – well, I think actually he didn’t even use – he found copy records. What librarians do is they look into a shared database, and if there’s copy that matches – if someone else has catalogued the book already, they can find that record and bring it in. He found – but we didn’t have a system – so he’d find a record, and at that time we had cards. He’d get the card, print it out, attach our holding to that record. And then if he didn’t find copy cataloguing, he’d do original cataloguing, which is a ton of work. This man did a really good job organizing the library. But then he left. I think he felt a little frustrated that he was working with scholars, but he didn’t have time to do his own scholarship. So after that – that was when the assistant curator had to manage the cataloguing. They were still buying books – I should say, they had started to buy books, because until that time, it was the Bliss’s library and Thelma Sullivan’s library. But they had started to buy books, and so Gordon McEwan was charged with overseeing copy cataloguing. So, they’d hire people from Telesec temporaries who had been trained as cataloguers, but Gordon wasn’t trained as a cataloguer. He was very concerned about this. He told me when I was hired, “I did the best I could, but I didn’t have the training, so I don’t know.” And it showed, because at the beginning there were a lot of records that had been brought in – I keep saying brought in, but we had claimed as our own. They were sitting in this great database called WorldCAT OCLC with our holdings attached, but they weren’t for the right manifestation of the work. We had bought – in the old days, we used to by every university microfilm dissertation that fit our profile. Now we don’t do that anymore because they’re available online. But we used to buy every hard copy. But instead of the copy cataloguing the hard copy being claimed, it was for the microfilm or microfiche, so it took us years to go find all of those and fix those. And also, they’d accept whatever call number was on the record, and sometimes it wasn’t what would work best for our users. But anyway, when I started, it was a three-year campaign of Elizabeth Boone to get a position funded for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies. She had to say, “Look, we’re going to be growing. We’re going to keep buying books, our field is growing, there’s a lot being published. We need to professionalize this and get a librarian.” And so after three years, the position was funded and I was hired. So, meantime, like I said, we were printing cards and – that was happening in Pre-Columbian Studies. Byzantine Studies had a whole library staff. They had Irene Vaslef as Director. They had two cataloguers at least, they had an acquisitions department. Landscape Architecture had a – I don’t know when their position got funded. But they had a librarian. I think they called her the librarian of the reference collection. And then they had the curator of rare books. And shortly after I was hired – when I was hired, it was someone named Laura. I forget her last name.

JNC: Byers.

BG: Byers. And she retired, and she had been there for a long time. It was Laura working with Betty MacDougall, who was the director of the program. And then it might have been at that point that they split it and created the position when they hired Linda Lott as rare books librarian and curator of rare books, and then the reference position, and it was Annie Thacher. So, the three programs all had the library organization structure in the way that worked best for their program. But it was a lot of work. It was actually impossible to keep up, because I was supposed to be finding – figuring out which books to buy, and in that day it was all paper. So, catalogues would be sent to me, booklists, phone calls would come through, faxes. And I was supposed to be selecting the books, creating new orders – which was mostly typing in, because we didn’t have a system to upload – so, creating the orders, sending the orders, receiving the books, paying the invoices, and then cataloguing the books. I had part time help to create the labels and stamp the books, and that was it. And I had help to shelve. What would happen, the cataloguing would wait. I would do the easiest cataloguing, and everything else was piling up. And this was happening in all three programs. So, it was good when the decision was made to get an integrated library system. That was under Angeliki. She selected a committee from the library staff here, and we researched it. That was when we started working closely with Harvard. We had Dale Flecker and his staff. They were our advisors. We decided – and he carefully cautioned us about going with Harvard. The choice was – the first choice was whether we were going to go onto Harvard’s HOLLIS system. And this was called a CHUI rather than a GUI. Remember “chewies” and “gooeys”? It was a character based interface, rather than a graphical user interface. It was a DOS-based system by this company called NOTIS. And he said, “We’re undergoing a several-year study to figure out what we’re moving to. If you come on now, you’re going to have to migrate with us.” And also, they had over years – they had bought an off-the-shelf system, but then they modified it so much so that it was not recognizable anymore. They had a whole department called OIS – Office of Information Systems – to maintain it. So their system was now called their own. It was Harvard’s system. And he said, “This has all these issues.” So, he said, “Honestly too, you’re going to be everyone’s last thought down here. We’re not used to thinking about you. Given that, you’re welcome to go onto HOLLIS.” But we decided not to. We selected SIRSI – is the company – the Unicorn system. And it’s an integrated library system. So what we did, we loaded our records from OCLC, that WorldCAT OCLC. We had been attaching our symbol to them all those years, so we were able to load them into a system, and SIRSI called their software Unicorn. And we had Unicorn, and it was at that point we started working together – the three departments here, but we still had very little to do with Harvard. They helped us with the data load, and then after that for years, we were on our own. We had a library information – I forget what we called her – but she managed our software. It was Donna Bible. And Ingrid Gibson, who is now interlibrary loan, but she had done a lot for the upkeep of our Unicorn system. That went along fine – well, not really fine. It went along, but it brought us all three together, but it was an odd time because we were still – I was still reporting to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, the landscape people were reporting to their director, and people – the directors were coming and going, so we had to work together, but the organizational structure had us working separately and taking separate lines of command. So Ned Keenan came in and said, “Okay, what do we have to do next, and what will work?” And we created taskforces. So the first thing was created a taskforce for acquisitions. It was called the ATF – the Acquisitions Task Force. We had jokes about that. That was bringing people from the three programs to figure out how to best use SIRSI, because it was supposed to be integrated and we were using it separately. So, we integrated that, then we integrated cataloguing. We still did not have a library as an organizational structure. We did not have a library director. Then we needed to – Ned Keenan said, “Okay, it’s time to bring this all together.” He created the position for Library Director, and Sheila Klos was hired. She came in, I think, 1997 or 1998, and a year later, the big decision was made – to go back and retrospectively convert all of the records that were done pre-Library of Congress classification for Landscape Architecture and Byzantine Studies because those two programs had used a system they had started before OCLC, before the world was sharing everything. A librarian at Harvard had created the Brinkler System. So, he created classification systems by subject area. And he created a Brinkler for Byzantine Studies and a Brinkler for Landscape Architecture. So, even after both of those programs went onto OCLC, they continued using their very beloved classification system. The scholars loved them. They were used to them; they worked for their fields. But for the cataloguers, and therefore for the entire library staff, it was an incredible amount of work. They’d have to re-class everything. This is a lot of work. I mean, it’s a scientific hierarchy. At one point, they had stopped. I think it was the time when we integrated when we created the taskforce, Ned Keenan said, “No. We’re going to have split libraries. We’re going to have the old Brinkler stuff and everybody is going to go LC. We wanted that. The librarians were happy. The scholars, especially the older scholars, were appalled. The world was coming to an end. We had the library separated, but this was in the old house still. We had books everywhere. We had books in closets, we had books up to the ceiling, and we had books double stacked. They were used to that. They knew where their books were. Then all of a sudden, we had a separate little collection that was LC. And again, everything physically was separate. So, there was the pre-Columbian library, the landscape – we called it the garden library – and the Byzantine library. So, then we had the split collection. Sheila Klos was hired and she was told, “You decide with the staff what we should do.” And we decided we should retrospectively convert it. That was a year after she started. And then in – eight years ago, I guess it was 2005 – we moved over physically and that was when the books were integrated. So, it was huge. You asked me about Harvard, but even more importantly in my career here, it’s been the relationship of the library with its programs that has undergone complete evolution. So then, we still had SIRSI Unicorn, and then it was getting to be – oh, then Harvard selected their new system. The graphical user interface, and that was a long time ago now. I don’t remember what year. They selected it, they got comfortable with it, they were happy with it. So, the same year that we moved over here, we went onto HOLLIS fully. Now, our records were in there. Our titles were showing in HOLLIS as being held at Dumbarton Oaks, but that was the only thing. We were not using it for creating our orders or for paying or for doing cataloguing work. We were doing all of the cataloguing work in our system and then uploading it to HOLLIS. So, this was going to be a huge change. Well we did it the same year we moved in [laughs] – just about did the tech services staff in.

JW: What were some of the biggest issues you faced during the move from the Main House to the new library building?

BG: There were so many issues. It was a lot of work. Sheila took care of most of the planning work, of working with the book movers, but then we had to monitor the work, and I would say one of the biggest issues was communication – because it was just a lot of physical logistics that had to happen. The book movers were still here. The contractors were finishing up the work on the house. There was this list. I forget what they called it. It was kind of like the checklist at the end; all of the little stuff that didn’t get done during the big construction. So, all these contractors were still running around doing stuff. We were supposed to – we had to monitor any contractors. They couldn’t be alone in the library. So, one of us had to be there babysitting. The doors were still locked – we couldn’t go – it was extremely stressful. I think the stress came from – the construction was delayed. We had a smaller window of time to move than we had anticipated. The fall semester was still going to start on time and we had to be ready for primetime in, I think, six weeks. Ned Keenan was out of town, and the director of Landscape Architecture was out of town – maybe even moving. I think they were in between directors. Again, this – now, this wouldn’t mean as much because we operate – the organizational structure is our own command. But then, we were still very much intertwined. So, what were the issues? The issues were keeping track of the books, getting the staff settled in, and all of that had to happen in a very short time. There was a lot of clean up. Even, “where are these books?” and “how are we going to manage this?” and “what kind of buttons are we going to put on this?” And then right after that, they had to start the HOLLIS – using HOLLIS. So they had to learn a new system. We had a shadow database in case any didn’t load properly. We had this old database of our stuff and they’d have to go back in and look. So, it was double and triple work to do the same function – for tech services. This wasn’t so much for me, but for my colleagues. For me, it was getting used to being physically separate from Pre-Columbian Studies. And even though we were in the same building, we were on different floors. And again, it was – the beginning was extraordinarily rocky in settling in. I think definitely the library works better in that new building and it’s well-designed, but the stress was such that it took years for people to get over that.

JW: Were you consulted at all with regards to the design of the new building?

BG: Well, we were initially. Sheila worked very closely with the planning committee for the building. So, Sheila did, yes.

JW: And what factors, if any, make the Dumbarton Oaks’s collection different from those in other libraries that are research institutions?

BG: Well, I tell our readers and Fellows when first come to the library – all of the scholars – I tell them, for Pre-Columbian Studies, what’s special is we collect comprehensively in a very narrow field. So, even though the Library of Congress and the University of Texas at Austin have probably almost all of the same books as we have, our collection offers the advantage of that’s all we have – the art history, anthropology of the cultures from pre-conquest up until the early colonial period and from Mesoamerica, central America, and the Andes – where they might have most of our books but in a wider collection of the entire history and anthropology and art history of Latin America. And ours are open stacks, and I also collect gray literature. One of the long-term projects that I’ve done here, which is, I think, one of my major sources of pride and a good legacy for Dumbarton Oaks, is to collect dissertations from Latin America in archaeology. Years ago, people would say, “Oh, it would be great if you could get these dissertations out of Peru, so when Jeff Quilter was Director, we started – the thing is, they don’t have anything like UMI down in Latin America. In Mexico, they have something similar, because a lot of Mexican archaeologists are funded by the government, so they have to turn in a copy, and in Colombia as well; but in Peru they don’t have anything like that. So, one of our Fellows said he’d go back home – one of our Peruvian Fellows – and send me stuff. And so he started photocopying down there – he had grad students do all of this photocopying – and these manuscripts or these photocopies would come loose in these giant packages that look like – for some reason, they were wrapped in burlap and sewn. Everybody hated them when they came, they were like, “Oh no, Bridget got some more dissertations.” And because the photocopying was often poorly done – some of them went back to the fifties – so they were photocopies of typescripts with bad margins, and they used paper – it’s a size that they use in Latin America and Europe called A4. So, they’d come in and sometimes we could use them and just bind them, but sometimes they weren’t bindable, so we’d have to re-photocopy them and make better margins, or try to darken them or lighten them or whatever. And so it was an incredible amount of work, but then – we have the only collection, and we started with the north coast of Peru, and then he helped us with dissertations out of the universities in Lima, and then the southern area of Peru, which, in some cases – we have dissertations that even the libraries and universities no longer have there, or, if they have them, people couldn’t get to them. It was during a period of the Shining Path, and places were not easily accessible, so we have a really important collection. And one time at my conference, the collection development librarian at Harvard asked me what tools I was using to collect because we were getting all these things that they weren’t, and I thought, “Ah!” [laughs]

JW: To your mind, has this collection of dissertations proved useful to the scholarship coming out of Dumbarton Oaks?

BG: Definitely.

JW: How so?

BG: Well, people come here asking for it. And we kind of – an unexpected consequence was we’d get inter-library loan requests for these, and we don’t lend much on inter-library loan. Period. And these – we have the only copy, so we have to be careful, we have to be sure we’re going to get this back. I like to make our resources available to the scholars, so when we do lend them, we lend them with a lot of restrictions: this has to be used in the rare book room or special collection, under the supervision of a librarian. So, definitely it’s noticed that we have them, and people are – one thing they comment on, and this was – we needed special funding to do this because it was expensive to – they all needed original cataloguing, like I said, they needed a lot of checking, they needed re-photocopying, but especially the original cataloguing. We’d send them out a lot, and we asked for more money, and the Byzant – the Director who came from Byzantine studies would say, “Why do you want these? I mean, most of the times the conclusions are, you know, later [laughing] disproven.” We said, you know, “It’s not the analysis, it’s the raw data.” And that’s what our archaeologists would say. A lot of time these never get published – this data never gets published, so it’s the raw data. And we convinced him, and eventually – again, back to our connection with Harvard: back in the day, there were no pre-Columbianists in Cambridge, but now we have Tom Cummins – there are a couple of chairs in pre-Columbian studies, [like] Gary Urton and Bill Fash. And they’d say, “Oh, definitely, you know; these are worthwhile.” So, not only have our connections increased as far as library technology, but subject area also.

JNC: How many dissertations have been collected?

BG: Maybe between 200 and 300. And then, unfortunately, we wanted to do it with Mexico and Costa Rica. Individuals said, “Oh we’ll go back and help.” But then we ran into issues with author permission. And the Costa Rican project – they said, “Well you’d have to get the permission of each and every author.” Now what Colombia did – we had to send their institute of archaeology a letter stating who we are and what we do: our collections do not circulate and we can put any restrictions that they needed to on them. So, we got a lot of great literature from Colombia, and not just dissertations, but the reports that they have to do, like the surveys before they excavate and the site reports afterwards. We were able to get all of those.

JW: So at this point in time, the libraries are integrated, you and your colleagues have secured some unique materials – what do you think the next big step is going to be in making the library as useful and user-friendly for scholars as possible?

BG: Digital initiatives. We’re in the middle of that big step. And it’s huge. It touches everybody, even people who aren’t doing anything with HTML or Plone, Omeka, just because – it’s very interesting – it creates a need for more refined description and more refined data on everything. An example is, Jan said, “Let’s participate” – and we’re happy about this – “Let’s participate in Harvard’s project to digitize rare books.” So he asked each program to select a few rare books every year and we have funding to send them up to Imaging Services, and they have the coolest, snazziest equipment to photograph the books, and they do a really good job. So, we were like, “Okay, we’ll send our books up.” Well guess what? You don’t just pack them up and send them. Most of our book – there’s a software that can create meta-data, so you put in the equivalent of a catalogue record and it creates the meta-data for every image. But most of our books don’t qualify, because, you know, they’re just too special. They don’t fit either the size or the quality of the image, so we had to create the meta-data, and thank goodness for Wendy Johnson, who’s a cataloguer who had just been trained in meta-data because she’s working on this big garden archive project. Well, meta-data is the equivalent of cataloguing each page. Of course, most of it is repeated, and you think, “Okay, well you just put in a page number or image number,” but no, because then you have to decide: what do you do when pages aren’t numbered? what do you do when there’s a section that’s not numbered, and then there’s a section that is, and then another unnumbered section? how do you refer to them? You can’t just say, “Unnumbered 1.” So we had – and guess what? in this world, it’s not all decided, and what we used to do for cataloguing – and I always notice this between us and the museum – that everything we had to do was already decided, like, they started in the 60s; they had international congresses to decide how to do this. We just had to learn the rules. But in the image world, they haven’t ever agreed on all of those rules. So now we were getting into that, and Wendy would call Harvard and say, “Well, you know, what do you want us to do for this?” And they said, “Whatever you want.” [laughs] “We recommend that you decide and stick to whatever you decide so that you remember.” [laughs] So we had to have all these meetings, and it was so detailed – pew! “Well, what do you want? Do you want the fore-edge, and do you want these hinges, and what are we going to call these?” But it was very interesting, but it was a ton of work. So, they went up, and they just came back. And Sheila went and unpacked them, and now our records are in Hollis. If you go to those books, you can click on the link, and you can see the books and page through them. So, it’s a big thing. That was just one thing. And then what – people used to do cataloguing of books. Like I said, Wendy – she’s now working with the Garden Archive Project – she and Sheila are in constant consultation with Harvard, because it’s a catalogue record for a letter, or some text that is linked to an image. It might be – it’s a photograph, or it’s a PDF of the letter. And then the transcription and all of this – okay, but how does that affect me? Well, it’s expected of me – like I say, I used to – I never did book exhibits before. When we moved into the library, I had to learn to do book exhibits, physical book exhibits, so that was a big learning curve. But I got it down, you know, it got to be routine. And then they said, “Well now we want you to put it online.” That was another thing to learn, and the first year I did it with Omeka, because we didn’t have Plone up and running yet. So, I did it with Omeka, and the next time I had to do it with Plone; and now, like I said, we’re getting more finely tuned, where we’re creating the digital facsimile of the whole book, not that that’s part of that project yet, but it could be. So, it’s always one more level getting to the information. The other thing that has changed greatly in my time is that we care about letting the whole world know what we have. When I started here, we were told, “Mm-mm, we don’t have the space, we don’t have the people, that’s not what we’re about. We’re here for the specialists. You know, we decide who comes and how many, and they have to know what they’re doing. We cannot hold any hands. And when they come here, they come here to use our books.” Like, they used to say, “We’re not even going to borrow inter-library loan for them, or rarely.” Because the idea is that the Fellows come here to use our materials. When they’re back home, they can get inter-library loans. But you can’t do that anymore. The world is all intertwined, and it was knocking on our door anyway. So, it was like, we have to decide how we’re going to manage this, how we’re going to control our image, how we’re going to control our digital access, and how we’re going to control their needs. So, now we – Deb gives them training on accessing Harvard’s electronic resources. We pay our part of accessing the electronic resources, and then we offer them to the Fellows. But that’s all changed in the time that I’ve been here.

JW: Did that change occur under Mr. Jan Ziolkowski’s directorship?

BG: Mainly.

JW: Could you characterize his directorship, especially as it pertains to the library system?

BG: Oh, definitely. Whereas Ned Keenan – what Ned Keenan did was get us organizationally integrated, which was no small feat, and then had the library built and moved – that, again, no small feat. But then Jan has – I would say what he has done is brought us closer to Harvard, and he wants Harvard to know how much we offer them. He wants us to always make ourselves known as a good resource to Harvard. And the digital world – I remember – well, he has shown – they all show a great interest in the library, but partly it’s – we’ve come so far in the last fifteen years. The library was always a good resource, but, to tell you the truth, the attention – it was usually thought of as, “Well, it’s taking care of itself, and they’re fine.” But then they realized that we needed more support and space and all of that. So I think it just gets a lot more attention. So ICFA – the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives – and the library are separate, but we have to know of each other’s work, and it had gotten to the point, you know, where it couldn’t be like – kind of like George Bush when he said “a thousand points of light,” all of these volunteer organizations that will take care of things. Well, we can’t just depend on ourselves reaching out collegially. We needed more structure, so he holds monthly meetings, where he brings us all together, people can report on what they’re doing, and he and Yota are there to hear what we need, and, you know, do we want Harvard to come down, like somebody from the copyright office. Because the other problem that comes up for everything that’s online is what we can put online versus – okay, for example, with my exhibits, I can put books in physical exhibits, where we don’t have copyright concerns, but that same book I cannot put online unless – well, we thought we couldn’t, so we would not put any of our facsimiles online. Well, it turns out that we can with certain restrictions, but we learned about that through this librarian lawyer who came down from Harvard – [laughs] – ,who said, “Everyone’s a lot more – they self-restrict a lot more than they have to.” So, it’s his job to train people in what they can do. So, that’s a big deal. The reason I mention this now is – at one of these, I think the second meeting we had, Jan had developed a mission statement for Dumbarton Oaks, including the library, and he said he wanted the library to be at the forefront of digital initiatives. And I remember thinking, “Too late!” [laughs] But then all of a sudden – we were – especially ICFA – I mean, that’s separate from the library, but we hear about it. They’re doing so much with digital initiatives. And I see the point now, that we’re the right – we’re a good size, we’re big enough, and we have really unique resources, so it makes sense that we put all of this effort into making them available digitally. And now we have enough people, and people with the right training and education, to make it happen. So that’s one of his big contributions.

JW: So we’re reaching the end of the interview. Maybe we can shift gears one last time to talk about life in general at Dumbarton Oaks: the social atmosphere…

BG: Well, one of the things I’ve enjoyed is having the whole community of Fellows. For the most part, it’s wonderful to have them here, you know. They come; they’re so excited to have this opportunity. I get to work very closely with experts in their field, and then they leave, but most of them come back, whether it’s to speak at a conference or come as a reader, or sometimes I just communicate through email with them – so, to just know all of these people. I don’t know – I think that, even though academics are a quirky crowd, as a whole they’re pretty happy with their lives. I mean, they chose it obviously, out of passion; they never thought they were going to make a lot of money. When I talk to other people who work – either librarians who work with other categories of patrons or patrons from other walks of life, I think I’m pretty happy with my patrons. And my colleagues – I think we have great people here, who really care about their work. And, again, I forget it, and I take it for granted, and then I go somewhere else – when I go to my conference, they’re also a good group of librarians; but I hear about the pressures they’re under. So, it’s good. This isn’t social so much as institutional, but a good thing is, we can still – Dumbarton Oaks can still pay attention to individual people and individual books, and other places can’t do that anymore. I mean, they have to buy wholesale books that were selected by somebody else, and you have to buy the cataloguing that comes with them, and you can’t do anything. And we still have – we’re still allowed, we’re still funded to catalogue; do original cataloguing and talk to individual researchers. So, that’s very nice, and through that we get to know the people, and then we get to keep really qualified staff.

JW: Do any memories, positive or negative, stick out about your time here at Dumbarton Oaks?

BG: Oh lots. [laughs] I’d have to pick…so many… I don’t know. I remember – I don’t know which ones to tell. But when Elizabeth Boone interviewed me, I remember she said, “We get some people who have a prima donna complex. So, tell me, how would you deal with that?” And I thought, boy that was a really good question. But it’s not too much of a problem in Pre-Columbian Studies.

JW: Do you remember your answer to the question?

BG: Yeah, and actually I do remember, and it’s kind of what I do. I said, “I pretend I don’t notice.” You know, I just treat everybody like – I address the issue at hand. And it does work, like if people are trying to push their weight around, or want special services – just pretend like it’s gone over my head [laughs].

JW: Is there anything that James and I have neglected to mention that you would like to discuss with us?

BG: I don’t think so. I hope I said enough about the Harvard – the evolution of our relationship with Harvard.

JWC: You did mention that Harvard gets a lot from Dumbarton Oaks. What do you think that you gain from Harvard?

BG: Well, in part it’s name recognition. If we have to deal with an outsider, and we say, “Oh, we’re part of Harvard,” they listen. [laughs] And also now a lot of support – not so much me in collection development – but tech services. And I’m so out of the loop now that I don’t know the details, but they deal with their Aleph people, so the systems people – Aleph is the software behind Hollis. They get systems support, they have to deal with the accounting office up there because – see, when I did acquisitions, we just managed all of our own accounting here. And then the finance office here reconciled with Harvard, but now the reconciliation has to start within, and our Director of Acquisitions, our Manager of Acquisitions has to reconcile all of the accounts in the Harvard system. So, it’s more work, but also a lot of support. See, that’s a double-edged thing, you know, because it’s a very complicated system; but I think everybody’s happy that we’re in Hollis. I mean, all of my colleagues, I think – we had gotten too big, and the world is too sophisticated to try to do it on our own anymore.

JW: You mentioned that you’ve got a very unique group of patrons at Dumbarton Oaks and you have very unique collections – how has working here changed your conception of what a librarian is and does, if at all?

BG: I don’t know if it’s changed it. I think it’s allowed me to be the librarian I had envisioned in the library that I had envisioned. And that’s what’s not true very many places anymore. I mean, the big university libraries, Ivy League, and the big public flagships, they can’t do it anymore. So, I think it’s confirmed for me.

JW: Well, unless we have any more questions…

JNC: There are a number of people whom we unfortunately cannot interview, and I was wondering if you had any interactions with Seka Allen, for example, and could say anything about what she did here.

BG: Oh…I did. I overlapped with her for years, but I don’t know if I can remember – because I did – my interaction with her was mainly having lunch with her; and I liked her a lot. She was one of the people in one of the Byzantine studies programs that really reached out to the pre-Columbianists; but as far as what she did with the index, I don’t remember. I just remember it was very physical, it was cards and papers and cutting and pasting. But she was a well-trained old-school librarian or archivist.

JNC: Thanks.

JW: Thanks you so much for your time.

BG: You’re welcome.

]]>No publisherAndeanPre-Columbian StudiesSpecial ExhibitionOral History ProjectArchaeologyAcquisition2013/06/21 14:25:00 GMT-4PageRichard Diehlhttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/richard-diehl
Oral History Interview with Richard Diehl, undertaken by Lorena Lama at the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House (Fellows Building) on June 10, 2011. At Dumbarton Oaks, Richard Diehl was a Pre-Columbian Studies Summer Fellow (1984) and Acting Director of Pre-Columbian Studies (1993–1994).LL: I am Lorena Lama. It is June 10, 2011, and I am here at the Guest House of Dumbarton Oaks with Richard Diehl, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Thank you for joining us today.

RD: A pleasure to be here.

LL: So, first question is how did you first hear about or become involved with Dumbarton Oaks?

RD: Okay. Excuse me, I’ve got a scratchy throat. I’ve got some throat lozenges but – my first connection with Dumbarton Oaks, my first knowledge of it was back in the 1960s. I excavated an Olmec site of San Lorenzo with Michael Coe of Yale University. I was a grad student at that time, this was 1966 and ’67 and that’s how I become involved in Olmec archaeology. It so happened at that time Dumbarton Oaks was just really beginning its life of Pre-Columbian Studies under the direction of Betty Benson, and Mike Coe was involved in sort of figuring out what Dumbarton Oaks was going to do, and one of the things they decided to do were symposia, what are now the fall symposia. The first one was on the Olmecs and I had been working with Mike at San Lorenzo and he and Betty were the organizers and they invited me to be a participant, a member of the audience. I did not give a presentation. At that point I was still Ab.D. I had finished my Ph.D. but had not written my dissertation. I was teaching at a place called California State College in California, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh. I was very honored to have this invitation to sit in on this conference. I really didn’t know what to expect and it turned out to be one of the most marvelous experiences of my life because it was like sitting in one of my graduate school seminars, which for me were always a great experience. And here I was a young soon-to-be professional amongst all of these middle range and senior scholars, Mike Coe, Ignacio Bernal, Matthew Stirling, on and on, and Robert Heizer from Berkeley. And I was able to observe them in this sort of seminar-like setting. They were giving presentations, and then they’d argue back and forth, which many of the discussions were included in the publication. That was my first experience at Dumbarton Oaks, and the Pre-Columbian wing had just been inaugurated, which I found absolutely gorgeous. But I had come out of a tradition in anthropology, what we call cultural ecology, with William Sanders as my professor. And one of the tenants of cultural ecology is that art doesn’t matter worth a damn. It has nothing to do with Pre-Columbian and ancient civilizations, it was what Bill used to call epi-phenomena – it meant fluff. And I suppose I carried some of that prejudice with me although Mike Coe had rubbed off some of the rougher edges. But in any case, I really didn’t get back to Dumbarton Oaks for about 20 years after that for a variety of reasons. The following year I finished my dissertation, I went to University of Missouri in Columbia where I was a professor from 1967, excuse me 1968, until 1986. And it was about 1982 when Elizabeth Boone, who had just come in a few years before as director of Pre-Columbian Studies after whatever took place here between Harvard and Yale. And I’ve heard some versions of it but I don’t know the story. Anyway, Elizabeth Boone was here and I got a telephone call from her asking me if I would be interested in organizing a summer seminar on what we call the Epiclassic in Mesomerica, the time period after the collapse of Teotihuacán up to the emergence of Tula as a major center. And I had worked at Tula during the 1970s. I had a major field project at the University of Missouri. And so I discussed this with Elizabeth and got interested in it. It turned out that she and Gordon Willey had sort of come up with this idea. Dumbarton Oaks had had one previous summer seminar, which never resulted in a publication for reasons that I don’t understand. In the end I agreed to do it and put together a group of five scholars, three art historians and two archaeologists. By that time I’d reach a point where I could tolerate art historians, and I’d always had an interest in art actually. Bill Sanders didn’t really beat it out of me completely. And so we had two archaeologists and three art historians, and we spent the summer over in the basement of the old house, in what was the rare book room, sitting around these rather cramped quarters, studying various topics related to the overall theme of the Epiclassic. And I say we were very cramped. Nevertheless, it was still permissible to smoke in Dumbarton Oaks. I was a pipe smoker in those days and I smoked my pipe down there. I had to bring in a little smoke extractor, one of these little whirly-cakes with a fan in it that pulled the smoke through a filter. That was the only thing you had to do to be legitimate in terms of smoking. I told you I’m going to wander. My first experience here at Dumbarton Oaks – I was overwhelmed with the surroundings. I’m just this boy from the backcountry, Pennsylvania Dutch. And I come into these settings with the Byzantine mosaics and all of this. I was a cigarette smoker in those days. And at one point in the conference – you were allowed to smoke everywhere in the building back in those days – at one point I found myself stamping out a cigarette with my foot on the face of Jesus Christ on the mosaic in the hallway. I went – wait a minute, this is not real cool. But anyway I didn’t get back to Dumbarton Oaks, because my research in the late ‘60s and ‘70s kind of took me in different directions from what Dumbarton Oaks was doing, which under Betty and Mike was very much a synthesis of archaeology and art. And that’s not where my research was focused in those days. And I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t – I was aware of the publications, I was buying quite a few of them, but I didn’t have any first hand experience until I came here to talk to Elizabeth about this Epiclassic summer seminar. So, we went ahead and did it. We spent nine weeks here and each person studying their own topic but we were in constant contact with each other and it was a great mix of people and ideas. We all lived in this building upstairs. At that time this was the refectory, the room over there was where everybody ate. The kitchen was back where the kitchen is today, but it was set up as a much larger kitchen to handle the number of people. Dumbarton Oaks was not nearly as big in those days as it is today so you didn’t have nearly as many people at lunch for example. And people would eat lunch in there and then come in here for coffee. But after lunchtime and in the morning we had the run of the building to ourselves. We stayed up here and we were in constant interaction. And I think that was one of the really critical things that contributed to the success of that summer seminar and the subsequent publication – is the fact that we were able to interact with each other intensely. Most of them were people that had never known each other. I hadn’t known – I only knew one of the other four participants before I arrived here. That was Joe Paul, the archaeologist. I had worked with him in Guatemala in 1969. We were both students then – well no, he was but I wasn’t. But we got along very well and we would swim in the pool together in the evening, every evening in the summer, and constantly talk about our research and how other people’s research might impact on ours. And that synergism was I think extremely important. That’s what I consider one of the threads through Dumbarton Oaks scholarship that I hope it hasn’t lost with the increase in size. By that I mean that people can interact with each other on an intense basis. At the same time they could get away from each other as we did from time to time. I would go off and do something downtown or someone else would go off. Sometimes we’d do it together. Some of us went up the C & O Canal once on a barge, and we’d go to concerts together. I’d go to the drag strip out in Maryland by myself because nobody else gave a damn about drag racing, but it was a very profitable summer for all of us. Since then I’ve had regular contact with Dumbarton Oaks. One of the things that came out of that summer for me personally was the realization that art, quote unquote, is an integral part of life and of what people do in the past and the present. And it has to be part of our understanding of the past regardless of what our academic training is. If we’re going to understand the past we have to know why people made what they did and what they thought about it. And that really sort of then brought me back into Dumbarton Oaks. I started attending the fall symposia, actually last night, my wife, who is also an archaeologist, and I were asking – we were talking – she asked me, how many fall symposia – well I asked her how many have we attended together? – because we got together as a couple about the same time that this happened. I had a previous marriage and she’d had a previous marriage, we met at an international congress of Americanists in Manchester, England in 1982 and I came here I believe in ’84 for the summer seminar. And I think together we’ve attended probably half of the fall symposia that have been held since about 1990. We get here about every other year, we can’t afford to do it every year because now I’m retired and nobody pays my travel and even when I was working, by and large my universities were not flush with travel funds. But this became an integral part of our life. I participated in a fall symposium as a participant, the one on Latin American Horizons. I had gotten to know Elizabeth Boone over that summer and we maintained contact. And then when she decided to take a sabbatical she contacted me. Actually, I was in Mexico sick as a dog in a hotel in Oaxaca, and the phone rang and I picked it up and lo’ and behold here’s Elizabeth Boone. I don’t know how she ever tracked me down. But she said, “I want to take a sabbatical, are you interested in replacing me as acting director of Pre-Columbian Studies for a year?” I said hell yes. So when I got back to the states I came up here and we talked about it, I interviewed with Angeliki Laiou, who was the director of D.O. at that point and the end result was that I came here, actually I started on July 1st of 1993 and I was acting director for that academic year, until July 1994. I had been chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Alabama for seven years prior to that and had stepped down as chairman. I could’ve stayed on another three years – I had been appointed to a second five year term – but I’d felt that seven years was enough to – let someone else have a say at how things go. And I was getting tired of it, frankly. So I had a sabbatical and I actually had a research grant to go to Mexico and excavate a place called La Mojarra on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. And I was going to do that during my sabbatical. The Dean of my college, Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama, allowed me to postpone my sabbatical a year and take the acting directorship here. So, I actually had two years off from the University of Alabama. The first year I was acting director, the second year my wife and I stayed here in Washington. We actually rented a house up on Garfield. We stayed there for the two years and then we were both here that fall, she stayed here in the winter. I went to Mexico for five months while she stayed here. She was doing her own research at the Smithsonian on objects in their collection. So, that worked out very well, and I did a field project. We came back here, spent the summer and moved back to Alabama. I remember driving down the street toward our house just thinking, you’ll probably have to bleep this out, but just thinking oh shit, we’ve been thrown out of heaven. Here we are, we’ve been living in Washington, which for us is heaven, for two years and here we are in Alabama again. And actually what we discovered is that it really wasn’t that bad because what had happened – and in all seriousness, I mean I make light of it – but when we moved here in 1993, the digital revolution was just beginning and email had just become something that people were doing. We were actually within the first 10,000 members of AOL and when we got to Alabama, by that time, email was up and running all over the world and what we discovered is that we can live in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and be in touch with everyone in the world. And that really made all the difference, I mean were it not for that we wouldn’t be there today. In all honesty, my wife would not have stayed, and I’d have followed her – but being able to be in contact with our colleagues in Mexico, people here in Washington, people in Japan. And it’s just a constant part of our life. And so we can live in Alabama and be part of the world mix academically and socially, and we are. And that made the advantages of living in Alabama all the more obvious to us, which is why I’ve been retired five years now. We have stayed there; we’ve renovated our house. They’ll take us out feet first. It’s a ranch house so it’s not going to be a whole lot of trouble. But we’re there for the duration and were it not for the digital revolution that would not be the case. Here in Washington it was – being in the position of Director of Pre-Columbian Studies is like being in the control tower at a Pre-Columbian airport. I mean literally everybody in the world comes into Washington – everyone in the Pre-Columbian world does – in great part because of Dumbarton Oaks. And anyone here at Dumbarton Oaks – you’re constantly interacting with these people, and that just was fabulous, those two years that we had here – especially my year as acting director because I did not feel under any pressure under acting director. I knew it was a one-year appointment and it was not like I could be fired. I had some tiffs with the director of D.O., with Angeliki, for whom I had and still do a tremendous admiration in a lot of ways – in a lot of ways I don’t. But I was really turned off by her leadership style. I mean, she led by fear, by instilling a fear of god in everyone under her. And I just don’t appreciate that leadership style. It’s not my style. I’ve been – I was an administrator at the University of Alabama for twenty-five years. I was chairman of the anthropology department, I was acting director of the School of Music for a year, I was acting director of the museums for a year, I was permanent director of the museums for 6 years and I had my own leadership style, and it’s very different than hers. Everyone here was just constantly quaking in fear of her. I mean especially – well, people below me in sort of the hierarchy, the ordinary employees. Many of them would not want to be in the same room with her. And yet when I look back on it, she was a very important part of turning this institution into what it is today, and she did a lot of really good things for Dumbarton Oaks. I’m really – I was sorry to hear when she passed away. But at the time she was a real pain in the ass – I mean she just was. You might want to bleep this out too. She went to Rome over Christmas holiday and when she came back she brought back a stuffed – what do you call it – snake, not a python but a viper, the ones they have in the baskets and kind of come out like this. I’m blocking on the name of this particular kind of snake. But she had it on her desk, and she had it sitting on her desk in a way that when you went in to talk to her – she had an arrangement of couches in front of her desk, and she would come and sit on the ouch with her back to her desk with this damn snake coming over her shoulder – and so you’re sitting here going like, oh hello boss. And the first time I saw it I just burst out laughing, which she didn’t appreciate. But I noticed other people, when I was in meetings in her office with her – I mean this was really intimidating. Anyway – but she was a very effective director and I see now her good points which I didn’t necessarily see when I was here. So, that sort of was my second major engagement with Dumbarton Oaks and actually my last. I’ve been here many times since then for lectures, for roundtables, for symposia and so forth. I now have this – actually I finished yesterday – my postdoc fellowship, which is my first postdoctoral fellowship in my life at age 70 – first one I ever applied for too. And it’s kind of ironic because I came here on this postdoc to kind of round out the La Mojarra project, which I started, it was a one season field project with National Geographic money in 1995 after I stepped down here. I went to Mexico for five months and went up and down the river each day on a boat and out digging in the cattle pasture, and it was a great experience – but I never had the time to write it up. I’ve always been busy with administration that when I retired four years this became one of my priorities – to finish this up. My postdoc is to do some background research in areas that I don’t have the bibliographic references available to me either in my library or the university library, but Dumbarton Oaks does – some of the geography and history of this particular area in Mexico, some of the archaeology, some of the obscure Mexican publications, and so forth. And so this is helping me sort of finish out something I started in a sense here at Dumbarton Oaks in terms of my own thinking about it. And I’ve just wandered all over the place, now you may want to get me back on your script.

LL: That’s totally fine. So, you mentioned the first Olmec symposium, or I think the first Pre-Columbian one as well.

RD: Yes.

LL: So, what was that experience like for you and how did that sort of influence your –

RD: Well, as I said, personally, it was a tremendous experience – just being around these senior scholars and virtually all of them treating me like an equal. And here I was – I was still a graduate student. Although the faculty at Penn State always treated its graduate student as equals, in all honesty, I suppose in part because it was a very young department. These were young faculty members themselves. We were their first graduate students going through. I was actually the first Ph.D. in archaeology at Penn State. So, I didn’t really expect to be treated that way with all these senior dogs kind of around here. I expected them to be sort of – to brush me off – get out here kid. But they didn’t. I remember Matthew Stirling, for example, who was almost god for us young guys – he had done all the Olmec archaeology – and we all thought he had done a lousy job of it because he had reported in National Geographic. Now I have more respect for National Geographic, and for what they do and for what Matt did. But I mean, he went way out of his way to treat me as a colleague, he sent me some of his publications. He and his wife Marion had all the participants over to their house, including my wife, who was with me and who had not come to the conference – she had stayed in the hotel because she was not an archaeologist. This was my first wife. And they just treated us very well so I really felt like part of the mix of the profession and I really tried to carry that over into my relationships with students because that was my first experience really with sort of being in a professorial group like this of names I’d always heard about but never met before. So, it did have that – and watching the give and take, the back and forth between the people on the podium was an interesting experience because I had attended some professional meetings before, in which whenever there were any exchanges they just had to be shouting matches. People really burst and taking it personally. Here it was much more collegial. And the whole setting here just gave me a completely different sense of what scholarship could be – just seeing all the books even that Betty had managed to collect at that point, indicated to me that there was something going on here. And then the Pre-Columbian art on display, including more than a few fakes – but that’s okay, every collection has fakes, you know. As a museum director I know this; you just have to live with it. But seeing them and seeing them displayed so beautifully and yet so instructively, and that is true today too. One thing that I really like about Dumbarton Oaks – and this is for all three sections – is the way they handle the use of art and object for the public and displaying them for the public in what is really a scholarly setting here. That’s the primary purpose, but the museums play an important role. They get a tremendous visitorship and they do a damn good job – they really do – and I’ve been in the museum world enough to know there are a lot of museums here in Washington that don’t. One, and I’ll say it right to the camera, the Museum of Native American Indians. My wife and I were down there last week – that’s my third visit – and I am so upset about the way that it’s organized that I just don’t want to go back. I shouldn’t have gone back this time. I keep going back wanting to give it a fair trial and I keep saying I’m going from the fourth floor, which is where you have to go to start, then you go down, all the way down the bottom, putting a lot of time into it and really soaking it up. Well, I only got down to floor one once, this time I didn’t even get down to the third floor before I got so pissed off before I didn’t – you know, let’s go to the National Gallery of Art where they know how to exhibit things, frankly. But here they have always done a really good job, and that was evident to me back then, long before I had any interest in the museum world or in objects. I was trained in archaeology that you use objects to learn about past people but you don’t admire them as creations of past people. I’ve since corrected my impressions this way. Okay. Well, I don’t know what else I can say about the first symposium. I had a 1958 Pontiac, it had a loud muffler on it but –

LL: Well, that’s wonderful.

RD: Wish I had that car today.

LL: Excuse me. And then you also mentioned that you’ve been to a lot more symposia throughout the years. So, how do you think they’ve changed or maybe how have they stayed the same?

RD: I really don’t have a sense of what Dumbarton Oaks was like in, say, 1968 because I was only here for a weekend. I’m going to take a throat lozenge here. But let’s go ahead to – well, the summer of 1984, was it ‘84? The older you get the more you lose dates and the more they kind of run together.

LL: It was 1984, yeah.

RD: Okay, good. That was the first time I got to really experience the place as an institution. And in those days it was much smaller than it is today. You didn’t have all the new buildings that you now have, which have been here maybe five years – so, the library, the garden house here, the new refectory in what had been the director’s house. Everything was pretty well jammed into this building, the house, what is now the refectory building, which was the director’s house, and the little house down there which in those days was the house of Don Smith, the gardener. And in fact, I used to go down there sometimes in the evenings when I was living here and, you know, take a cold six pack of beer down and sit down with Don and his wife and discuss gardening and, I don’t know, anything. But the institution was much smaller physically; there were many fewer people. It was much more intimate in a way, not as rule-bound as it is now. And it has to be. You have to have different colored lanyards for different kinds of people because there are too many people here. Back in the ‘80s everyone here knew everyone else. That can’t be the case. You have more guards than you ever did before and most people don’t know them by name. Back then it was much more like a family in a sense. Today, I think it’s more like a real extended family in which you kind of recognize that you all belong to the Dumbarton Oaks lineage or clan but you don’t know quite who everyone is. What it has not lost is sort of the dedication to scholarship that I think is the core of D.O., which I think is what Mildred Bliss really wanted to be the core. And I think that has remained ever since I’ve known the place. This is what it’s really about. And everything is designed around that. It’s designed to facilitate scholars. You come in here as a scholar – it’s almost like taking monastic orders – you come in to this monastery and there are certain behavioral patterns you’re expected to follow. And the same was true back then. It still is today. When you come here, for example, as a Fellow you’re expected to really devote your time to the fellowship and not be out running around hanging out in the mall a couple of days a week and so forth. You’re not supposed to go off and give talks, take off for a week and go to California or whatever. You’re here for the purpose of using – there are really two things that Dumbarton Oaks gives scholars that is maybe not unique. There are maybe a few other places in the world, the School of American Research in Santa Fe for anthropologists and maybe a couple of others, I don’t know. This is one of the few places you have all the things you need to do scholarship. You have all the books you could ever conceive of, and if they don’t have it they’ll break their backs to get it for you, they really will. They provide you with a comfortable environment, they provide you with adequate housing. I know people have been bitching and moaning about La Quercia, but I spent several years of my life living in trailers, so La Quercia can’t be that bad. They set everything up so you can do it, and then they expect you to do it because you have been chosen from a pretty competitive group of people to get this done, or this don as we call it in Spanish – this boon of being able to come here for that period of time. And you not only have all of the facilities here. One of the great things about Dumbarton Oaks is it pulls you away from home and you don’t have to mow the lawn. I mean, they have guys out there who mow the lawn, you don’t have to wash the car, you don’t have to do all of the day-in, day-out things that we all do on a daily basis. It’s done for you. It’s set up so you can get a good meal at midday that, if you play it right, that’s your big meal of the day. That’s the way we do it, the way I do it now. My wife and I have very light dinners and we have breakfast and so forth. And so you don’t have to worry about these things. Now, when I’m here I may be worrying that my backyard is turning into a jungle, and I’ll find out next week when I get home. Either that or it died in the drought but either way that’s not a concern of mine. I’ve actually been here, when we leave next Thursday, we will have been here for five weeks. I had a four week fellowship; we tacked an extra week on. Right now we have nine relatives who have come in town the last two days. They’re not living with us. We have a son who lives in Chevy Chase, and some are with him, some are in hotels, two grandkids who I’m going to bring here next week actually, they’re six and nine. They’re off to the Air and Space Museum now but in those six weeks or five weeks I have spent all my time really thinking about what I came here to think about, I honestly have. That has been the core of what I’ve done. For example, this morning I woke up at four thirty, which I don’t normally do, and I laid there and at five thirty I said to hell with it and got up and made some coffee. But I was thinking about scholarly related things – not specifically La Mojarra, but there’s a possibility that I’m going to organize either an Epiclassic period roundtable or a summer symposium at some point in the future. And that’s been rattling through my mind. When I woke up and got some coffee I started taking notes on this and I now have an outline for a roundtable. It’s total immersion into your scholarship, and I think all the ex-Fellows I’ve spoken with and the Fellows who are here now say this. It’s just beats the hell out of anything you can do at home, frankly, it truly does. It’s one of the unique things that Dumbarton Oaks offers. I don’t know any other place except for maybe the School of American Research in my discipline, and there may be others, and I’m sure there are, I know there are in other disciplines. But for us this is as good as it gets. I’ve said many times Dumbarton Oaks is our second home, and it truly is and I feel at home. I can be away for two years and come back here and people recognize me, the guards, older guards recognize me, some of the people on the garden staff, Hector, people in the kitchen, people over in the house. And that’s kind of neat. Most people don’t get to have those kinds of relationships in their lives. Now, other ways in which the institution has changed – well, I said a lot more rules, less flexibility in some things, although it was always kind of tight. There were always expectations or certain things you would not do and certain things you would do and so forth, and that has tightened up considerably. And I know some of the staff who have been here a long time could probably give you a much more biased opinion of it than I do. Because I have the luxury of just dipping in and out, once again, once I’m out of here and back home this doesn’t really affect me the way it does someone who’s working here for a salary. I have a feeling this is a pretty good place to work for non-academic people, people like the guards, the garden staff and so forth. I mean, I just have that sense form talking to them that these are jobs they enjoy – maybe not every day, especially if you’re a guard sitting in a chair, you have nothing to do except hear somebody badge in or badge out. But I’ve noticed they switch them off on a very regular basis too so they get a lot of different experiences during the day, and they don’t go to sleep at the door. I don’t know much about the directors of D.O. over the years. I mean there have been a number here. I’ve had very cordial relationships with all of them but I haven’t – other than my experience with Angeliki – I haven’t had constant – and actually, Angeliki had the good sense to hire a marvelous woman whose name escapes me now, who’s now deceased, as her assistant and this woman had worked in not-for-profit organizations all of her life, and everyone loved her and so everyone went to her rather than up to Angeliki and she was the conduit and that was very smart on Angeliki’s part to do that. Actually another thing I remember when I was here that summer was when what we called the Elizabeth Taylor house across the street, which is now the director’s home first came up for sale and actually Dumbarton Oaks started looking at it but didn’t buy it at that time. Elizabeth Boone and I went over – they had an auction of the furniture and they had a preview of the auction. You could go through the building and see the tackiest stuff I’ve seen in my life. Everybody called it the Elizabeth Taylor house. I don’t know if she ever lived there or not. John Warner did, and I don’t know who bought that furniture and who got the wallpaper but I mean, man, this was really bad, that stuff. As you were walking through there were all these socialites going through at the same time and they were just talking, oh I hope I can buy that piece and I hope.... They had the auction. I don’t know what happened to the house at that point. D.O. did not buy it then, it did later. But even back then it was looking to expand its space. It knew that the mission and the facilities had outgrown the mission is what – excuse me, the size of the mission had outgrown the facilities as they existed and they were starting to look around for new property. And then when I was Acting Director is when they finished La Quercia, finished renovation of it, and moved people in, actually, that summer. When I went out they moved the first group in, and at that time La Quercia was great. Everybody’s been complaining about it ever since.

LL: Yeah.

RD: And I haven’t seen it so I don’t know but as I’ve said I lived in a couple of house trailers so it’s a little hard to make me feel very sympathetic for someone who gets an apartment with a real air conditioner. Anything else you got?

LL: Okay. As a summer fellow in 1984 what was your everyday life like?

RD: I had a bedroom back, well, that end of the house. I got here first so I got the choice of the rooms. And at that time, well, there were some – let’s see, maybe one landscape summer fellow and there were one or two Byzantine, but it was primarily the Pre-Columbian people that summer. Now, there were a lot of other Byzantine scholars around that we interacted with. But we lived in this house. Everyone sort of made their own breakfast, but we’d all be over in the building probably by about 8:30 in the morning. We’d work in the morning, go to lunch, sometimes we’d go to the pool after lunch and before two o’clock. Two o’clock we had to get out of the pool because it was open for the public, and then we could get back into the pool after six o’clock. And sometimes people would do dinner here, sometimes they’d go to a restaurant nearby, sometimes we’d go as a group or as individuals. A couple of us had cars and so we were a little mobile, but actually the bus service was a lot better in those days than it is now. It has just fallen to pieces really since I was here in 1992. When we were here in ’92 the buses did come every ten minutes. But in any case we’d frequently go over to the pool for a picnic dinner, take some stuff over, swim and eat, and generally stay there until about dark or so. And there were some Byzantinists there and of course there was the famous Alexander Kazhdan – I’m sure you’ve heard about him, the man who died in the pool. No, you haven’t heard about him?

LL: No.

RD: Okay. You’ll have to get – I can give you the bare bones of the story as I’ve gotten it, but this is sort of third hand. You’ll have to talk to some people in Byzantine Studies to get this right. Alexander Kazhdan was a Russian Byzantinist who I guess the Blisses had actually helped get out of Russia in the 1960s and get him into the West, and he came here to Dumbarton Oaks and he lived here on the campus for the rest of his live. He actually lived in what is now the refectory. No I’m sorry, not the refectory, the building in front of the library where you walk in – it’s like a security building – I don’t know what all is in there, but that’s where you get your picture taken.

LL: Yeah.

RD: Okay. That was two apartments, and he and his family lived in one and at least, at times, the assistant director lived in the other. When I was here in the ‘80s the assistant director lived in the other half. And he was here forever and he would swim everyday, be out in the pool. This guy was considerably older than I was. He was a geezer. But I mean I’m a geezer. He’d be out there in the pool, and he’d just keep plugging away. To watch him was incredible. I’ve been a swimmer all my – I mean, I don’t look like it but I used to swim a mile a day, five days a week, year in, year out. I don’t do that anymore, but he would do it everyday. And normally they would have liked to have closed down the pool maybe at the end of September, but they always feared to because he kept swimming. And so they kind of said, well we’ll wait ‘til no one’s swimming in the pool. Well, hell, Alex was out there in November. I think he was breaking ice at some point, it was so cold. And sometime within the last five or six years he apparently passed away in the pool.

LL: Oh.

RD: And they found his body. I mean, not a bad way to go actually. Beats the hell out of being in a hospital with tubes coming out of your nostril. But check that story with somebody in Byzantine Studies because he was quite a character, sort of a garrulous old guy but quite friendly. I don’t know how good his English was, really. I never had any deep conversations with him but he’d be out there every night, and we’d be out there 3 or 4 nights a week. That was a very nice perk. And then on weekends some of us would work, some of us would go off. I remember I took a weekend off. I’m originally from Eastern Pennsylvania. My sister still lives there so I went up there to visit her on weekends, and sometimes we’d go somewhere in the surrounding area – over to Baltimore, something like that, or just relax. But everything always – the scholarship always was integrated in everything that you did. Because you were a bunch of scholars interested in the same thing thrown together in a way which never happens in most universities. Because there’s no one at my university who really understands what I do even in my own department. We all do our own things. We discuss our research and our interests and so forth, but we don’t have the same interests. And so when you get the chance to really bounce ideas off people, you do it. And that’s one of the nice things about this place. But it was a pretty relaxed kind of an atmosphere. It got a little tense over the fourth of July when they had a barbeque out in the driveway and had quite a bit of beer. And I remember they were actually barbequing crab. Don Smith, the head of gardens, had run off and got a whole bunch of crabs that they cooked up. Didn’t barbeque really but there was also a regular barbeque going. And then later in the evening, there was a fireworks display downtown and some of the Fellows who perhaps had more beer than they should have, decided to go into the house, climb up into the attic and climb out into the roof to watch the fireworks. That’s a pretty damn steep roof. They could’ve fallen to their – and they didn’t. And I wasn’t one of them. I’d had quite a bit to drink and I couldn’t climb any steps, let alone – I don’t want to die a martyr. And I think there was a couple of tense stays after that when the word got out that the roof had been violated. It was like another – The summer seminar that followed us was the one in Pre-Columbian Studies because I think in those days they switched departments each summer. One summer in Byzantine Studies, the next summer was Pre-Columbian, the next Landscape. The next Pre-Columbian one was on Aztec matters, and they apparently set up a soccer net out on the north field here and started playing soccer and tearing up the grass. That didn’t last very long. There are things like that. You learn everywhere you go – you learn there are things you shouldn’t do. I mean like bringing your squirrel gun to the university and shooting squirrels. Which actually when we were here in 1993, there was a guy from North Carolina State University in religious studies who told this story. He was a Byzantinist. He was teaching religious studies at North Carolina State. He told this story about the previous fall, a student from western North Carolina had shown up on campus and of course, he brought a squirrel gun with him and like most university campuses there are squirrels all over the place and this kid was just popping these things left and right and cooking them up in his room. The administration kind of got on his case. He had to send the squirrel gun home. There are lots of squirrels around here but I don’t know if anyone tried to kill them. I know one Mexican scholar who ran around – oh god. Maria Rodriguez ran around picking up acorns, and her husband was saying, boy you look like a squirrel. She had this whole batch of acorns she just took back to Veracruz, Mexico and I don’t think any of them ever survived when she tried to plant them. But we were here in the fall, there’s just a certain time when the Dumbarton oaks shed all their acorns. So, I tried planting some at home. That didn’t work in Alabama either. But I think that’s more me than the climate. Yeah, what else?

LL: So, the summer seminar that year. How was that organized and sort of who participated in it?

RD: Well, I say Elizabeth contacted me, and it turned out that really she and Gordon Willey had cooked this thing up themselves, and I think they were kind of desperate at that point. They had had this first Pre-Columbian summer seminar that for whatever reason just kind of fizzled. I don’t quite understand. Maybe a publication, an article or two came out, but there was never any book or anything. And I don’t know how they decided on this topic or how they decided on me, frankly, because this was not an area, not a theme that I was connected with academically or in terms of my own research. I had worked at the site of Tula and it does have an Epiclassic – does play an important part in the Epiclassic period. But in any case they contacted me, Elizabeth did, and we started talking back and forth, and she had a lot of suggestions for art historians – which I had no idea who was in art history at that point. And really even as today there are very few Pre-Columbian art historians. There are probably, I’ll take a wild guess and say maybe five in the world who are bonafide, who have terminal degrees – Ph.D. degrees in Pre-Columbian art history. It’s a very small field, and then it was a lot smaller. Although there have always been people who have been interested in art history but who are anthropologists, and so we started talking over a list of names and who had information relevant to the time period who might be available to come here and who might be able to take advantage of the resources here. Who did we consider to be not just a reputable scholar but someone who could create a contribution while here, someone who was going to take advantage of this in terms of advancing knowledge about the Epiclassic, not just regurgitating what we know? And so it came down to, oh I don’t know, a list of about a dozen people, and then some people were not available, some people were not interested. For a variety of reasons we ended up with the five people we had, and it turned out to be really a marvelous clue and I have lost touch with some of them over the years but 3 or 4 years will go by and we’ll get back in touch. Some of them have changed emphases. Janet Berlo, who was one of the art historians, has really gotten out of Mesoamerica entirely. She now does North American Indian, Plains Indian art. Ellen Baird, Bebe Baird, went into full time administration at what used to be called, excuse me, University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. And now it’s called University of Illinois, Chicago. And really has been sort of out of scholarship for a number of years. Joe Ball – I see him from time to time, I really don’t know what he’s doing. Jeff Kowalski has maintained his interest, and in fact he organized a roundtable here on Tula and Chichen Itza maybe about seven years with another art historian, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, who’s now at Auburn University in Alabama. And I actually participated in that, and so he has remained active. But people have gone around – and this happens in scholarship all the time. People go their own ways, some people go into administration, some people drop out entirely, some people retire and garden the rest of their lives, some people – it’s just natural attrition. So for example now, in my thinking about doing something twenty-five years later, as I go through the names of potential participants, there are a great many new people but not many of the old people anymore. Which is kind of neat. You need to get knew blood and new kinds of thinking into these things and someone like me becomes fossilized and maybe our best role is in organizing something like this. I don’t know, I’m seventy years old and I’m still having a hell of a lot of fun.

LL: Let’s put in another tape. So, in 1993 you came in as acting director. What were your duties then?

RD: Well, I was really quite fortunate because Elizabeth Boone had basically left the year set up. The next Pre-Columbian symposium was already lined up. I had to start maneuvers for the following one. By that time there was a board of Senior Fellows which had not existed until sometime during Elizabeth Boone’s – during the change over from when Yale ran the place to when Harvard pulled the reins in, as some people say. But really what I had to do was sit in the basement there, answer the phone, answer the mail, work with the staff. And at that time a lot of the staff were who are now in other divisions, for example Bridget Gazzo who is a Pre-Columbian librarian – she was under the director not the library staff. And I don’t know how the curatorships run here now, but in those days my assistant was the assistant curator, Carol Callaway. And we had five Fellows here that year. Oh gosh, who all were they? Dennis Tedlock and his wife Barbara was around because she had a fellowship somewhere down on a mall, maybe the Smithsonian. Kitty Allen was one, Chris Beekman, Saburo Sugiyama. Who else? There was another female. So, I was sort of in charge of the Fellows, making sure they did what they were supposed to do. And actually we all met as a group once a week for a couple of hours and just talked about what they were doing – because they are a pretty disparate bunch of people in terms of their interests. There were some Andeanists, there were some Mesoamericanists, and so we would meet once a week and that was sort of one of the high points of the week. There were a fair amount of social duties, embassy events – the Canadian Embassy, the Mexican Embassy, we got very actively involved in the Mexico Cultural Institute, which was just starting up at that point. And the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, which was just starting up that year, and we still are active in that. We come to their meetings maybe once every other year and we keep in touch with the members. It’s sort of an amateur group here in town, but they are really quite knowledgeable amateurs. Actually, one of them just got his Ph.D. in anthropology from Catholic doing South American textiles – just was awesome. And I worked some with the docents. I had meetings once a week with Angeliki’s assistant, once a month with Angeliki. We had sort of issues with the collections at times. We had a lot of problems with the Philip Johnson building leaking water. Actually, the foundation started caving in at one point and we had to get that fixed. One, I believe, January day I came in and there was perhaps a half an inch of ice on the inside of the glass on the Philip Johnson building all around it. And so we had to get all the objects out and then melt the water and get it out of there. There were a lot of water problems. We had floods in the library, in the basement. We had to remove all the books form the bottom shelves at one point, take all the carpet out, throw it out, wet-vac it out. There were constant issues like that, but there were no critical strategic decisions to be made. And as I say Elizabeth just left it in perfect condition, and she was here in town. She had a fellowship down at CASVA, the National Gallery of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. And so she was here if I needed her. I tried not to contact her. She would sometimes sneak in at night when she wanted to get something out of the office or something. But we maintained contact with each other, and if I had any real problems I would contact her. I didn’t want to leave problems for her to handle, and I hope I didn’t. I’m not aware of any that I did. So, that when she came back it was a very smooth transition, just as it had been with me. When I came in the day I came she greeted me, she showed me around and then she said you’re not going to see me for the next month and I didn’t. And so I did the same thing when I ended, although we continued living up the street here. I actually – although I would’ve loved to use the library – I stayed out of the building for the entire fall semester, because I didn’t want to seem like I was treading – and this is just part of my leadership, this is part of my style. I’ve done this with every job that I’ve ever stepped down from. I just stay away and let my successors establish their own ground. And then after – well, actually, after I got back from Mexico, after the La Mojarra trip, then I started coming over here and using the library again and by that time everything was back on an even keel. But it was – there were no really outstanding issues. I got a lot of insight into Dumbarton Oaks as an organization by talking with the other directors and with other people. I got to know a number of people on the staff quite well, I’d have lunch with them frequently just as now I have lunch with the docents for example and sometimes with the gardener. But there was a man named Glenn Ruby who was in charge of Publications in those days, and Glenn and I became good friends and some of the permanent scholarly staff in Byzantine Studies. In those days Byzantine Studies was much more predominant here than Pre-Columbian Studies and Landscape up until recently. Byzantine Studies has sort of been the dog not the tail. Now you’ve got a three-piece dog. It is really quite different in terms of the number of fellowships, the resources and everything. And that’s been I think quite recent – I would say primarily since Joanne has come in as Director, but it’s not just in Pre-Columbian Studies. It’s my sense that’s the way it is throughout the whole organization. And I wouldn’t say that Byzantine has lost anything, I don’t have that sense. But that the other two have gained. And you know, this is really the finest, this is the primo Byzantine Studies center in the world. It really is. And I think it’s important that it remain that. I mean, I don’t give a damn about Byzantine Studies in many senses, but this is a critical place for that very arcane realm of scholarship. Just as Pre-Columbian Studies is rather arcane – and the same with Landscape Architecture. I learned a lot from Joachim, and I forget his last name – it’s a hyphenated name; he was a German, he is a German. He was Director of Landscape and Garden when I was in Pre-Columbian Studies, and we’d have a lot of conversations about landscape and how people use landscape. And since I’d come out of this cultural ecology background, with a strong emphasis on how people use landscapes but more in an agricultural sense and farming, we had a lot in common, really. So that was good. And I see now he has a book. There’s a new book section on the fourth floor there, rather a new book section, and then there’s a section where they have books by Dumbarton Oaks authors. And he has a new book out in German, which I don’t read. It looks good. It was a very interesting year. It had a lot of social aspects to it, which has never in a sense been my strong suit. But I managed it pretty well with the help of my wife. I won’t say I learned how to tie a tie because I knew how to do that before I got here. But as one of my colleagues said, boy you look pretty spiffy here, Diehl. But it was a fascinating year. I mean it was – I’m trying to think. This was the year that it was the fiftieth year anniversary of the Dumbarton Oaks Accords, which set up the post Word War II economy. So, there was a big celebration here. Both here and then down at the State Department. So, we all got invited, including a lot of the staff, got invited down to this do up on the eighth floor of the State Department overlooking the mall. They have this really super sort of party patio up there. Everybody’s running around with their coats and ties. All the secretaries had dresses on and high heels and the whole nine yards. Which is not – this is one of the more informal places I know in terms of dress code. Men who wear ties here are the kind of men who’ve been wearing ties all their lives. They don’t know any better. They grew up doing it, they were born doing it. I don’t know. But it’s rather informal in that sense, and that’s another thing I think that remains, just from what I’ve seen. There’s a line though. You don’t see many men wearing shorts around here, for example. And I don’t know if anybody ever said that or if it’s a rule or what, but it’s just not what you see here. I think they will wear – maybe in the summer some of the Fellows will. I don’t know. I’ve worn shorts here a couple of times in the library, but at my age I don’t care what anybody thinks. But one of the things I’ve noticed – and I don’t know what this means – but – and this just since I’m here this time – almost all of the researchers, I’ll say under the age of forty, when they’re working have their earbuds in. They’re listening I assume to music, just as you guys probably do when you’re studying. People my age don’t by large. When I’m at home – I have a beautiful office at home that’s bigger than this room. It’s actually a two car and a half garage that was enclosed as a party room. And then when we bought the house I turned it into an office and library, and my wife has an office in one of the bedrooms over in the other side of the house. So, we get together for lunch and stuff. It’s great for working at home. But when I’m at home, I will listen to music when I’m working but not with earphones on. I have my stereo system. But I can’t listen to anyone talking. I can’t even listen to vocal music because it distracts me. I start listening to what someone is saying. But I can listen to – I listen primarily to classical music when I’m working. Other times Blues or Cajun, but then I’m listening to the lyrics and I’m not good at multitasking. But here I’ve noticed that virtually all the younger researchers are listening to something while they’re working. And that’s a change. But I think that back when I was here in the ‘80s there were no earbuds or anything. There was hardly any portable music. Yeah, what else you got?

LL: Okay, so did your time as Acting Director sort of change your perspective or understanding of Dumbarton Oaks?

RD: Well, it gave me a lot more insight into the organization and the administration and the way an institution of this sort works. When I was here in the summer seminar I sort of saw it through the eyes of a scholar. And we were pretty well let alone to do what we were here to do unless there was some reason to interrupt us. But Elizabeth would not – she would come in and chat with us briefly each day and so forth. But I did not go away from the summer with a sense of how the organization operated, and I don’t know if I was consciously interested in that at that point. It’s rather interesting because it was right after – what happened was, after that summer I went back to Columbia, Missouri – the University of Missouri – for one year. And then I moved to Alabama as chairman of the anthropology department. And I had wanted to leave Missouri for a number of years. And I just couldn’t do it. My first wife and I had divorced. We had a son who was about twelve when we divorced, and we both agreed that we would stay in Columbia until he got out of high school. We kept our houses joint property. She and my son lived in the house. I rented an apartment about a quarter of a mile away so Rich could just go back and forth. And we had a sort of joint custody arrangement. He spent every other day with me and every other day with her. And we were close enough to his schools that he could just walk. But that was coming to an end at that point. I was anxious to leave Missouri for a variety of reasons. And actually I went back for a year after leaving here and then went to Alabama, accepted the position of chairman at Alabama. I don’t know if my experience here during that summer made me more amenable to taking an administrative position or not. Until the Alabama offer came up it was sort of not on my radar to get into administration. One of the things that attracted me to Alabama was the opportunity to create a Ph.D. program. They had a Master’s program; they did not have a Ph.D. program. And so I saw the opportunity to create a new kind of Ph.D. program. Most Ph.D. programs in existence in anthropology today were created in the ‘60s, like the Penn State. Harvard’s been around a lot longer. And they kind of represented a post World War II flowering of the discipline; they represent an approach – even today – an approach to the discipline and a teaching of it that was really molded in the ‘60s and is way out of date, frankly. And I’ve always – I argued this in the ‘80s and I still argue it today. In the case of Alabama, I went there and started the process of creating a Ph.D. program. That did not really come to fruition until about 6 years ago, long after I left. It took three more chairs to get this, but I got the ball rolling, just as I did in – that seems to be what I do as an administrator. I get the ball rolling on things. Renovation of the museum at Moundville, for example, I got that started – got much of the fundraising done before I stepped down as director of the museums. And I don’t know to tell you the truth that my experience here made me more amenable to taking the job at Alabama when it was offered. It just came out of the blue. It came sitting in a bar. I was sitting in a bar in Columbia, Missouri when one of the faculty members who was a friend of mine, who had gone to Alabama about fifteen years before and had come back for Christmas because his wife was nearby. And we were – Dick Krause was his name, Richard Krause. We were sitting at bar throwing down some beers, and he said why don’t you come to Alabama as chairman? I said, yeah, don’t bullshit me man. But he was serious and I actually ended up applying for the job – and got it – and never regretted it. But that then set me on a whole train of administration, the next step in which was coming back here as Acting Director. And then when I went back to Alabama in 1995, I went back to the anthropology department as a fulltime teacher for the first time in my life there. But during that year the dean of arts and sciences asked me to take over the School of Music as an interim acting director because he had to fire the previous director, and he didn’t want to hire anyone from within the school. So, I came in kind of as an outside straw boss, basically, to kind of hold the place together until they could hire someone externally – which they did. And then I got another acting position in the museums because of another failed search, and then I finally took that job permanently. But as I said, I spent the next twenty-five years doing administration and Dumbarton Oaks was – most people who become department chairs in American universities don’t go on to other administrative posts. It’s kind of viewed almost as you’re duty bound to become a chair in a lot of institutions. Everyone has to. Once you get to a certain level and you’re a full professor, it’s kind of expected you will do your duty as a chair for a couple of years. Frequently, it’s only three. Now in the case of Alabama it’s a little bit different because the chairs have more power and therefore longer terms. They are five-year appointments and so forth. Most people don’t – they then go back to becoming – I don’t want to say regular faculty, but go back to their basic career of teaching and research. In my case that was really what I kind of intended to do when I stepped down as chairman and then I had the year off, the year sabbatical coming. I actually finagled a full year out of the dean. I was only supposed to get a semester. But I convinced him that I needed two semesters, one a regular sabbatical and one an administrative leave. It was unprecedented for Alabama. They don’t do it anymore. I think I was the last one to get it. So he gave that to me. And then I came here and I rather suspect – actually when I went back to Alabama after being Acting Director I was kind of looking for something in administration. I think the dean knew it. And at that particular point in time Alabama was very short on seasoned administrators because they had some really bad financial years in the early ‘90s as many universities did. They had a lot of faculty buyouts, early retirements. And many people who’d had administrative experience said to hell with this shit, I’m out of here. And they retired. And there were not a lot of people around to fill some of these positions. And I was one – my head was sticking up on the horizon. And as the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hit with a hammer. And the School of Music was a fascinating experience for a year. The faculty had no idea I was being appointed until I was introduced to them. And then the dean left the room and I thought, you bastard. Have you guys have ever seen the movie, the Buddy Holly Story? You know who Buddy Holly was? You’re not even old enough – early rock and roll singer who died in a plane crash. In the movie there’s a scene in which Buddy Holly and his Crickets from Lubbock, Texas get hired to go to New York and to play in the Apollo theatre, which is this all black theatre in Harlem, and they didn’t know it, which is true historically too. And they came out on the stage and it was a completely black audience, it just went dead silent and Buddy Holly looked at the other guys and said, let’s just play fast. And they did. And they got the crowd going with them. And that’s kind of how I felt when I got introduced to thirty-three music professors who didn’t know that this anthropologist is going to be their boss for the next few months. Some of them never got over it. Some of them actually tried to have me fired a day before my term ended. Just to be able to say they had done it. They were so mad. Others loved it – they thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I’m still friends with quite a few of them but it was – it started out kind of rocky. We had a band room upstairs where we stored all the instruments. And people refused to lock the doors. And occasionally instruments would disappear, and this had been going on quite a bit in the past. And in the first few months I tried gently to get them to lock it. And I finally got so pissed off that I was going to Hawaii – actually there’s an organization that meets called NMSU, which is a nonsense name but it’s directors of schools of music of state universities and they invite – you’re only allowed to attend by invitation. They invite one director from each state and not necessarily the biggest school or whatever – really weird organization. Anyways, the director of the University of Alabama always went and that year the meeting was being held on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. My secretary goes: well, you have to go to this meeting on Waikiki Beach and I go what? It turned out the tickets were so cheap I got one for my wife, they were like $400 roundtrip to we go off to Hawaii. I got so mad about this band room thing. I have a log chain at home. And I got a log chain and a padlock and I chained and padlocked the doors for the duration. And so nobody could get in the band room for a week. And then when I came back I took the chain off and there was a grumbling, but the doors were always locked. They had a sense of who they were screwing with. But that was an interesting – that and the museums, were an interesting experience too, but they really have nothing directly to do with D.O. But yeah, I think maybe D.O. did that year – did solidify my interest in doing administration. And then I finally reached a point, and I think a lot of administrators do, the stress just got to me, frankly. And I resigned as museum director, went back to the anthropology department, taught for two full years before I retired. And every year I was museum director I had to fire people because of budget cuts. And the last time I had to fire twenty-five percent of my staff – not because they were incompetent – in fact, I could not fire the incompetents that I wanted to. It was on tenure, who had been there the longest, and sort of who were critical to the mission. And two days after I did that – and I did it each individually and I sat down with each person and told them they were out of a job. One guy had been working there for sixteen years. And two days later Sue and I took off for Mexico City and got into a horrible mess in downtown Mexico City – wrong hotel, noisy. I lost my passport in the airport and had to get a new passport – don’t ever lose your passport – if you do get a second one but your name goes on a list. If you lose that second passport you will never get another passport. You will never leave the United States again. I had that drummed into me in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. And I ran into a situation. I developed such bad insomnia that in the seventeen days we were in Mexico I did not sleep for fourteen nights, not a minute. And we finally came back to the states and I went to the doctor, and it was all stress – it was just cumulative stress. And once I got out of the museums the stress let up quite a bit. Once I retired the stress just – oh my god, believe me ten years ago I couldn’t have sat here and been sort of as laid back as I have been. Retirement is great. You ought to be able to retire when you’re gone, I think. So now – and I think I want to come back to D.O. I’m not looking for a job or anything, I’ve got a paycheck, but I want to have more continual contact with D.O. I think it’s an important organization. I think there are some things I can do for it, particularly in Mexico. I have kind of a unique set of connections with Mexican scholars that I have developed over the years and I speak fluent Spanish. My first wife was Mexican, and she never spoke English. And so we spoke Spanish at home for fifteen years. She was form Tabasco. I sound like a Tasbacan farmer. She wasn’t from a farming family, but I picked up all the farmer’s slang. And I think Dumbarton Oaks has done a really good job of tying – the Pre-Columbian has done a really good job of trying in with the Andean scholars in the last ten years or so. And I’m so glad to see that developing because I think D.O. has played an important part in what I see as a real flowering of Andean studies in recent times. And I think it can do the same thing in Mexico. I think there’s a whole cadre of new Mexican archaeologists, young people, who need to know about D.O. and need to get here. One of the problems is their spoken English isn’t that good, they don’t have a lot of practice. My wife Sue Scott is an archaeologist. She got her Ph.D. from the University of London under Warwick Bray. She’s up in the apartment. Well no, actually right now they’re down at the Air and Space Museum with grandkids. God, what a zoo that’s going to be. But she also does. Well, she started doing Teotihuacán figurines. Now she does wooden masks with mosaic inlays and she does Teotihuacán masks, stone masks. She’s really more of a museum person, an object person – not from the art perspective, but just from the anthropological, construction, dating. She’s working with Franny Berdan and some other people on wooden masks out here in Suitland, Maryland. The National Museum of American Indians has its full collections. They’ve got 800,000 objects out there. We were out there last week for a day. She photographed some masks, and she’s working on that. Anyway, we’re going to go to Mexico in October. We weren’t going to come here for the fall symposium but I have an interest sort of in the archaeology of conflict, which just developed since January, since I started teaching this course. This course dealt with recent developments in archaeology in the last ten years, major new developments and I thought I’d have all graduate students. Well, their curricula is so tied up with courses they have to take, because we really push people to get through a Master’s degree in two years writing a thesis. And so they don’t have a lot of flexibility. So I ended up with nine undergraduates. I started out with a list of forty topics, which I narrowed down to eighteen. And I sat down with the class the first day, we narrowed it down to twelve. And it turned out none of these people had had any archaeology beyond and introductory course. One girl had had – young woman, I can’t call her girl – anyone under forty is a girl in my mind – had had one summer field experience. But we did topics like archaeology in the media, archaeology in the Internet, paleonutrition was one they wanted to do. What I sometimes call combat archaeology, the archaeology of conflict, used to be called battlefield archaeology. We spent two weeks on that. Oh god, what all did we do. I mean we did all sorts of things just one week after another. We did rock art and shamanism for two weeks. But I did a section on this, and then it turned out the fall symposium – on the archaeology of conflict – and the fall symposium is on the archaeology of conflict. And it’s a very interesting lineup of topics because it’s really kind of different than anything else I’ve ever seen in the archeology of conflict. And that’s one of the things – there’s a kind of scholarship at Dumbarton Oaks that Dumbarton Oaks does and has done forever that really melds the humanities and the social sciences in a way that very few universities do. And that’s very evident in this list of topics for the fall symposium. And I’m sitting there looking at it, thinking well if you got all the Andeanists – hasn’t anybody looked at the archaeological site of Sacsayhuamán where there was this big battle for months between the Spaniards and the Indians, look at it as a battlefield. No, nobody has. In Mesoamerica nobody has looked at the fields of Otumba where Cortes and his men, after fleeing Tenochtitlan near the Battle of Otumba – there was a marker out there. I don’t even know what’s the right field. But I surveyed that cornfield in the 1960s for Bill Sanders. I don’t remember what we found, but nobody has ever studied it from the perspective of warfare. And so this is going to be an interesting symposium. Anyways, after this we are going to Mexico for four or five weeks, and there’s going to be a mesa redonda at Teotihuacán that we’re going to attend. I started my career at Teotihuacán in research – Sue that’s her major focus. We’ll go there and I’m going to start talking to people in Mexico about Dumbarton Oaks in the way that I used to talk to then about FAMSI, the Foundation for the Advancement for Mesoamerican Studies, which I was on the board of directors of for fifteen years. And I would go to Mexico and drum up Mexican interest and get people to apply for grants and stuff. I think D.O. needs to have some more Mexicans come through here. See how it goes.

LL: So, I have one final question. So, you mentioned that you would like to remain involved with D.O. and I mean, you have been for so many years and I was just wondering what the reason behind that is.

RD: Pardon me?

LL: What the reason behind that is, why you’re so connected to D.O.

RD: Well, in a sense it’s kind of like my involvement in FAMSI. And actually I got involved in FAMSI the year I was – FAMSI was founded – this was a private foundation, set up by a sugar daddy on Wall Street for fostering research in Mesoamerica. And he funded it out of his own pocket for fifteen years, got tired of it, said to hell with this and he was involved in banking, the bank crash, sub-prime mortgages, his wife died at that point he spent – His name is Lou Ranieri, if you’ve ever read the book Liar’s Poker – you probably haven’t but Liar’s Poker deals with Wall Street on the 1980s, the excesses of Wall Street. Half of the book is about Lou Ranieri. He invented the concept of mortgage bonds, he’s the one who has led to the present crisis in the American economy. But anyway, Lou started the organization when I was here, and I was a little leery or getting involved in it. I got a call from Dorie Reents-Budet about this. Dorie was involved in it through the whole time, and she said we have this possibility – this foundation is going to get started, are you interested in participating? And I said well what is this? Who is it? Well it was Mike Coe, and Gillette Griffin – Gillete’s a collector – and Marilyn Goldstein – you had a bunch of people, Justin and Barbara Kerr. And I said well, now wait a minute, this guy has a private collection is there any chance.... No, no, the collection will have nothing to do with FAMSI, and it never did – it never belonged to FAMSI – although it was stored in the building that’s the FAMSI headquarters. So, I went down to Crystal Rivers, Florida. We all got together and met this guy who looked like a janitor – literally, when I first met him I thought he was a janitor at a building. Turns out he was the billionaire who was funding this thing. And over the years we created this organization that did a tremendous amount to foster the whole field of Mesoamerican studies. I mean, I think we financed more Ph.D. dissertations than anybody in history, I don’t know, I forget how many million dollars we gave out in grant money over the fifteen years – had a real substantial impact. Lou got tired of it and, you know, the foundation collapsed. The website will continue. It now belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and they will continue it. I feel about Dumbarton Oaks the way I felt about FAMSI, and that is that here is an organization that is unique, that can do tremendous things, and that I can help. And I’m very careful about how I spend my time – very jealous of my time. I’m seventy years old, and I’m not going to live a hell of a lot much longer. I mean, let’s face it – I don’t have another seventy years left. I have no idea how many. You don’t either; you don’t know how many years you have. You know, none of us do. I know that, I don’t expect – I do things that interest me, and D.O. has always interested me; fostering Mesoamerican studies has always interested me; getting Mexicans involved in the field has always interested me – Latin Americans in general but since virtually all my work except for one field season at Kaminaljuyu, has been in Mexico, Mexico is a real focus for me – getting them involved like when I was Acting Director. I had a number of Mexicans I was able to bring up here: Ponciano Ortiz and his wife Maria Rodriguez. And I think that’s an important – that’s something I can do for D.O. and I think it’s something that would help the organization. So, I’m very careful about the battles I pick these days because one hour a day is blocked out every day of the week to get in my Mazda Miata, which I bought as my retirement gift to myself, drop the roof, which I can do in Alabama twelve months a year, drive to Barnes & Noble, where they have a Starbucks get a cup of coffee and New York newspaper and just sort of spend an hour a day. And even after I buy myself a Nook, which I’m going to do when I go back, I’ll probably take the damn Nook to Barnes & Noble and read it there. But that’s one hour of the day that’s my hour. And so here I stop over, I don’t spend an hour, but I stop over at the Starbucks here on my way down the hill, grab an iced tea and drink on my way, get rid of it before I get in the library and sometimes stop on the way back and go to the patio upstairs and read my paper. It’s a great life, as somebody once said in a movie. But okay, what else?

LL: Thank you so much.

RD: That’s it. Well, I’m glad to do this. I hope it helps. There’s a lot about this institution and I don’t know how much – if anyone wants to pick out about the institution on what I’ve said in the last hour or so they’re going to have to winnow through a lot of extraneous bullshit but – yeah – but it’s all there. And I have kind of a unique perspective too, really.

LL: Yeah.

RD: Because this has never been my bread and butter and that’s a different way of looking at things. Speaking of bread and butter…

LL: …yeah, lunch.

RD: You guys ready for lunch.

LL: Yes.

]]>No publisherArt HistoryAndeanPre-Columbian StudiesAztecFellows BuildingOral History ProjectArchaeology2013/01/02 18:00:00 GMT-4PageRicardo Agurcia Fasquellehttp://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oral-history-project/ricardo-agurcia-fasquelle
Oral History Interview with Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle, undertaken by Alyce de Carteret at the Dumbarton Oaks Guest House (Fellows Building) on January 11, 2011. At Dumbarton Oaks, Ricardo Agurcia was a Fellow (1996–1997 and spring 2013) in the Pre-Columbian Studies Program.AdC: It is January 11, 2011. I am Alyce de Carteret and I have the pleasure of interviewing Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle today, here in the Guest House at Dumbarton Oaks. Dr. Agurcia is currently the Vice President of the Copán Association and the Executive Director and was formerly a Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies here at Dumbarton Oaks. Thanks for joining us today.

RAF: My pleasure.

AdC: So just to begin, how did you first come to know about Dumbarton Oaks and what were your initial impressions of the institution?

RAF: I think my first coming to know of Dumbarton Oaks had to the do with the publication series and the books and obviously while I was being trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist they were a very valuable resource. And then of course, the grants program was being circulated and went around to the various universities, and that’s how I came to know of Dumbarton Oaks and what it was doing – its fellowships program in particular. And to tell you the truth it seemed like something that should exist but I didn’t believe would exist. It’s a just wonderful institution, just a wonderful institution.

AdC: Now were there any publications in particular that you thought were really excellent?

RAF: You know I would say that about – mostly I was focusing on the series on Pre-Columbian Studies, but I think every one of the publications was just of the finest quality. Not just in terms of the binding, the paper, the quality of the publication, but the subjects that were picked and the information that was out was tremendously valuable. I mean those that were published about Central Mexico or those that were coming out about the Maya. Just excellent publications, you know?

AdC: Now something I hear about those early publications was that they actually had the transcriptions of the entire meetings at the end of them. Was that something that you had in school as well and in reading those early publications?

RAF: Well, I was – it was more the focus works on themes like warfare, human sacrifice, and things like that and then the ones that got put out but later too about Maya deities and things like that, that were more the focused monographs rather than the reports of meetings, per se.

AdC: And what was the grant program that you mentioned?

RAF: The fellowships, basically.

AdC: Oh, the fellowships. And how did you come to hear about those fellowships and then become a Fellow?

RAF: It really was because we’d been working at Copán for quite a few years with both Bill Fash and Bob Sharer and both of them actually happened to be at that time on the board of Dumbarton Oaks and they actually encouraged me because it was a stage where we’d been dong a lot of excavation, so I had a lot of raw data and information in my hands but I hadn’t sat down to write anything. So, you know, where are you going to go to have the space and the time and the luxury of the bibliographic resources that you have here? It was definitely – there is no place in Honduras like that. I mean, I would have to go to Mexico or Boston or Philadelphia or Tulane, my alma mater, to have access to comparative data and information about similar things like the ones I’d been finding. So the idea of coming to Dumbarton Oaks was precisely that, was to be able to have some time, some space to evaluate, analyze and do comparative studies of the stuff I’d been excavating at Copán – specifically, the Rosalila temple, which I had discovered in 1989. So, it was, you know, time to get some of that stuff published and the best way to do it, you have to have a place, a time to do it, and the resources and all those were here.

AdC: So what would an average day look like as a Fellow here?

RAF: Oh you know, it was such a delight. It was – it’s like being a kid in a toy store, I think. Because you’d come in – and I’m kind of – compared to my other Fellows that were here at that time, I’m kind of an early riser, so I’d be one of the first ones in. But the mornings were tremendously productive. And really it was just having a ton of books out, looking at them, comparing them, and taking notes. And then another important facet, I brought a lot of information with me from field drawings and stuff from Copán, was making Xeroxes of stuff, and compiling files of comparative data. Specifically I was looking at the epigraphy and the iconography of Rosalila. And finding the images and then starting to compare those images with stuff coming from ceramics or coming from other buildings or coming from hieroglyphic texts and going on to say well, this image is a tie to that and that and the other and then compiling – I still have them, those are my folders that I use continually ever since then to evaluate the iconography of Rosalila.

AdC: And that was a major project you were working on?

RAF: That’s exactly a major project I was working on and I was able to – by the time I was done the article that came out of that is really, I think, to this day the best publication about Rosalila that there is. It was a wonderful opportunity.

AdC: And what was the social life like back then? Did you get to know any other Fellows?

RAF: Oh my goodness, I was incredibly privileged. There are the group of Maya scholars that were here, or Mesomerican scholars that were here at the same time I was – was just unbelievable. It was Dorie Reents-Budet who was here, it was Simon Martin and the other – it was Simon, Dorie and I’ll think of his name in a second. And Jeffrey Quilter was just starting at that time. And so the tertulias, I don’t know how you say tertulias in English, the chats, the sessions, the meetings that we had –

AdC: In English it is tertulias.

RAF: Tertulias? Yeah. I mean there was a Mexican restaurant around the corner. Not only would they start here, but they would end over there with a pitcher of margaritas. And if not there, there was a Starbucks not too far. And of course, we were all coffee freaks so we would – and I still have, you know, discussions and drawings on napkins from Dumbarton Oaks – I mean, from Starbucks – that we had of our discussions because Simon, of course, was an expert on epigraphy and he could – he brought that side. Dorie was an art historian and so – and I was a dirt archaeologist. We were all from – looking at the same stuff from different aspects and I would say that the – Adam Herring was the other scholar. And Adam just was coming out of Yale working with – was one of Mary Miller’s students. So, each one of us had a different way of looking at the same thing. And I mean we threw Rosalila out on the floor, on the cutting board, chopped it up, talked about it, what does it mean? What is all this about? And really, I’m a dirt archaeologist, I’m used to talking about potshards and stratigraphy and stuff like that. I knew nothing about iconography, and here I had this incredible resource of human beings around me as well as the library – that I could just go read article after article, book after book of stuff, so it was a tremendous formation point. And so the human interaction was as valuable. Mostly for me the morning was my own time, hitting the books, making copies, organizing files of information. And then lunch, of course, the talking, the chatting would take place and oftentimes after that we would go to have coffee at Starbucks then come back and hit the books some more. So it was just a priceless experience. Really and truly. It was a life changing experience for me and my career, without a doubt.

AdC: Was there much interaction between Pre-Columbian Fellows and those in Byzantine and in Landscape Studies when you were here or was it pretty separate?

RAF: You know, there was interaction and I remember especially too there was an Israeli archaeologist that was here in the Byzantine program and we had very good and productive conversations and exchanges with him and much less with Landscape. But there were exchanges. And the conferences every Friday – I think it was we met – and somebody was giving a talk on whatever stuff they were – I imagine they still do that here and, you know, some of those were terribly boring, if I may be completely frank. But some of them were just really delightful even if they came from other fields. You know it’s an opportunity to see – I’ve seen the world from other people’s point of view. And it’s always an enriching experience, at least from my perspective. And the other thing that was also fantastic were the concerts. Those were to die for, I mean really. So in every one of them – the food was also just incredible. It was a delightful combination of all events. I wouldn’t say that the exchanges with Landscape Architecture and with the Byzantine Studies was terribly dynamic, but it was pleasant and it was enriching in its own form and fashion.

AdC: And you were, I believe this is correct, you were the first Fellow actually to come from a Latin American country. And it seems more recently that Dumbarton Oaks has been trying to reach out to scholars of Latin America and Central America. Was that a really formative experience being the first?

RAF: Well, I didn’t know I was the first until you mentioned it – I had no idea. I had assumed that there had been quite a few other scholars from either the Andes or Mesoamerica some place. So, that would be a surprise to me. But again, in terms of my own personal experience it was priceless because again, I was raised, born in Honduras, I lived there. I went back there as soon I got out of graduate school to work but our resources there are very, very poor. If I have to do research on a subject that has to do with my work in archaeology, if I don’t have the book in my personal library I will not find it anywhere else in Honduras. So, I mean, it’s what it’s in arms reach in my own home or my office that I have these resources. So coming to a place like this where just about everything or any article you can dream of is there, it’s a treasure. Like I said, it’s like a kid in a candy shop because all the stuff was there at arm’s reach, you could just walk over there, grab it and sit down and study it. You know, it’s fabulous.

AdC: So you’re currently here for the Copán workshop, and I was wondering if you could just explain a little bit about the purpose of the workshop and what Dumbarton Oaks’ role is in that?

RAF: The Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project was one of that genre of very large, big time, heavy duty archaeological projects. It involved some of the most powerful research institutions in the United States that work with the Maya. And it went on for a good twenty years practically or something close to that because there were lots of offshoots. The fact is that what started with the Copán Acropolis Project has to do with the work I’m continuing even to this day, so even if the project itself stopped because the financial resources came to an end, the work in it that we started back then continued and so did my colleagues, each one getting their own sources of financing. But again each one of us is physically in a separate, different location, a different place, and we have in common the Acropolis of Copán. And we worked in basically four different areas which were – Will Andrews and Tulane were on the south side of the Acropolis, in the area known as El Cementerio. On the upper part of the Acropolis, I was working. In the East Court Bob Sharer was working, and in the Hieroglyphic Stairway Bill Fash was working. So each one of us had kind of a separate area all relating to the Acropolis. And each one went about digging holes and finding stuff and at this meeting – this is the third or fourth one that we have, it’s basically all of us trying to bring all those threads and loose threads together and having a complete overview of the Acropolis at Copán from its inception, from its first building and constructions all the way to the last ones that we see. And we have all shared, you know – we had a very loose structure for working, which was delightful because each one of us had a lot of independence in how we’re working and how we went about our research. We are now at that stage where we need to get a global, overall view of the Acropolis and its evolution through time and that’s exactly what we are doing right now. The common thread to all of us is Rudy Larios who is here with us. Rudy is in charge of all the restoration, conservation work. He’s the only one that can actually work with all four of us and can tie the threads from one end to the other. So the big synthesis of the architectural history of the Acropolis is basically being operated by Rudy. And each one of use contributes with our individual sections of this massive earthwork that was the Acropolis. So we are exchanging information, reviewing the sequences being presented by Rudy – well you know, this is good, this doesn’t work, got this one, take that one away, how does stuff, how do my building phases relate to Bill Fash’s and to Bob Sharer’s building phases and the stuff that took place on the south end of the Acropolis. So that’s the technical side of the stuff, it’s comparing data and sharing data to get us all on the same page and view the history of the Acropolis as a team. And then the other side of it is the publication series of our work. It’s moving ahead and standardizing the volumes, the books and who is putting what in which chapter and where it’s going to be published, so we’re coordinating the whole publication process and again, sharing and trying to do the format of what we’re writing up, how we’re going to write it up, nomenclature, illustrations and all these things so that basically even though the publications will come out of three different institutions we will try to have a common ground for all of them and the way the publications are made. So these are the two principal areas we’ll be working in all week and it’s a ton of stuff we have to see, we have to look at. We share stuff like radiocarbon dates. We’ll be sharing with David Stuart the side of the epigraphy and the monuments and tying those monuments to the global vision of the Acropolis and its stratigraphy. It’s an exciting process and it’s already – even just what we’ve done today, it’s worth the whole trip.

AdC: And how did Dumbarton Oaks come to be the center for this project?

RAF: Well, what can I say? It’s the perfect place for it. When I was here as a Fellow – it’s got the ingredients, it’s got the physical location, it’s got the resources in terms of library stuff and information and it’s just a common ground for all of us in Pre-Columbian Studies. So I really can’t think – well, the School of American Research was another possibility in Santa Fe, but in terms of think tanks and places where you can just take the time and have a beautiful setting to think, talk and discuss and come to important conclusions, there aren’t that many alternatives. And there is always that element of quality at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, it’s a class – I don’t know what you call it, but it is a very special center and it’s just top notch.

AdC: Speaking about Copán, a couple of years ago they held an off-site symposium in Antigua Guatemala and afterwards you were able to introduce some of the scholars present to Copán and take them all to the site. How would you describe what that experience was like, having Fellows from Dumbarton Oaks at the site of Copán?

RAF: Well, the truth is that Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks tend to be very carefully selected and I know that. So, you know you’re dealing with very educated, intelligent people even if they’re – it’s an archaeologist working in Peru and the substance matter that he’s working on will be different from what we have, he still has a whole world of important experiences. So, what the arrival of this group from Dumbarton Oaks to Copán was really a wonderful opportunity to share our work and all of us were in the field at that time still, which was – it was hotcakes just coming off the griddle, we were just right there in the middle of it and sharing with colleagues and with intelligent, educated people. It was a wonderful experience, it was very productive to us and you know when I hear Joanne talking about it and how enriching it was to them and to her as a group, because it was hands-on, we went places where very few people can go. A lot of the off-limit stuff in the research areas and the tunnels of the Acropolis, even at our own research center. It was a fantastic opportunity to share but also to learn from the commentaries of the scholars that were visiting.

AdC: Did you receive any interesting feedback from the scholars that you want to use?

RAF: Yes, we did. I mean in terms of methods, techniques, and stuff that would help us in our fieldwork and ideas too, it was just good ideas. We looked at this from this angle and stuff like that. It was very enriching too.

AdC: Were you able to attend any those off-site symposia at Antigua, outside the city or Lima?

RAF: No, I haven’t been to any of those.

AdC: But you’ve attended other Dumbarton Oaks symposia?

RAF: Yeah, but here. At Dumbarton Oaks.

AdC: In... yeah, at Dumbarton Oaks?

RAF: Yes.

AdC: Were there any of those symposia that you thought were particularly successful or unsuccessful? Or what was the experience like at these symposia?

RAF: I feel this way about many symposia. Many times there is too much information and too little time and it’s hard to digest and inform it – I mean absorb it – as you are there. But they’ve always picked, I think, themes that are very important to our field and it’s usually the selection of the scholars that are involved who are, again, of the highest quality. So, they tend to be very thoughtful publications and the – I think I probably enjoy reading the publications of them more than I do being present at the presentations themselves. But I’m also kind of fidgety, I don’t like sitting in one place too long.

AdC: So there wasn’t any symposia in particular that you thought was very stimulating

RAF: No, no.

AdC: Over the years that you have been involved in Dumbarton Oaks you’ve had the opportunity to interact with two different directors for Pre-Columbian Studies, Jeffrey Quilter and Joanne Pillsbury. I was wondering if you could comment on how each one impacted the program and how their styles differed. How you could characterize each one of their impacts?

RAF: Well, since I was here when Jeff was here I obviously had – it was for a whole academic year. I was really much more exposed to Jeff and his style of work and what can I say? It was so easygoing and thought provocative because he was working mostly on Lower Central America and again brought – which was an area that I was very interested in my early years too. It led to very enriching discussions. But Joanne comes from a different field really. But I wouldn’t say, I could be wrong, since I haven’t been here while Joanne’s been director and spent a lot of time. But I think they’re both growing in the same direction. I think overall they have a sense of the importance of Dumbarton Oaks because it’s not just a place for archaeologists and you get such a mixture – even the fact that you have the Byzantinists here, the landscape architects, it’s a place where people from different fields come and share stuff, not just your own little clique, your own little group of people who are looking at the same stuff the same way. I mean, my experience – I mean, Jeff is an archaeologist so he and I tend to talk more kind of shop there that we’re used to but all the other Fellows that were here – Simon at that stage was not even yet – he was coming out of design, and Dorie was coming out of just art history, had been doing it. So was Adam. So, it has been very enriching to have different perspectives on the same subject and I am sure that is something that continues under Joanne. Looking at the people that are here today working, it just seems very similar. And so I think if you’re going to come to Dumbarton Oaks you have to be willing to talk a language that isn’t just your own shop and what you’re used to doing everyday. You have to be open to exposure to other fields and other ways of looking even at the same data and I think that can only be productive and good.

AdC: Do you think while you were here Dumbarton Oaks was able to strike that balance between both archaeology and art history but also Mesoamerica and the Andes –

RAF: Yes.

AdC: – with the Byzantine scholars as well?

RAF: Yes, definitely. I mean definitely, it was the wonderful part of the experience of being here. And even with the Israeli archaeologist there was a lot of stuff we sat down to talk about, field methods and dating techniques, a whole bunch of other things that we could sit down and talk.

AdC: Did that experience change how you practiced archaeology after Dumbarton Oaks.

RAF: Yes and I have to say that the archaeology of Copán and the Acropolis project had a different approach from traditional archaeology to begin with because we were working with art historians from the inception, from the very beginning and we were working with epigraphers from the very beginning of the Copán Acropolis Project in 1989. And that was not the normal way of doing – I mean, I worked previously on other projects in Copán that were like hardcore archaeology, you know. You only talk to archaeologists basically. And that was not the case when – our project had a very substantial, I would say, essential preoccupation about conservation, and the care of the archaeological site and the archaeological resources, which again is not typical of that. And then the sharing with art historians, with epigraphers was really a very different approach to archaeology than what was traditional in the ‘70s and early ‘80s too. So, I’d say that that was important in my coming to Dumbarton Oaks and feeling more at ease and dealing with other scholars from these other fields, especially the art history and the epigraphy.

AdC: Because you’d already been exposed to it.

RAF: Yes, it was part of our game plan. It was part of our understanding that you can really learn a lot if you listen to people from these other fields. There were a lot my colleagues at that stage that felt that all the stuff that was in the epigraphy was just lies or stuff made up from the guys that won the wars. And perhaps that a lot of it was just fantasy and our projects certainly proved that most of it is not fantasy: it’s history and it’s documented well and accurately by the Maya.

AdC: And the project you were working on was about kingship and cosmology while you were here at Dumbarton Oaks?

RAF: That was a subject, basically it was focusing on the iconography of Rosalila and its architecture and it was very interesting because with Rosalila, as in many other aspects of our project, I was trying to find hardcore data, archaeological data that would help to verify or deny the stuff that’s on the epigraphic record but also a lot of stuff that’s coming from the iconography, the scenes of human sacrifice, of personal sacrifice and the functions of the buildings, these temples. If we’re seeing in the artwork all these rituals taking place then do we find archaeological data for it? And in the case of Rosalila it was very, very clear. I found, for example, the incense burners inside the most sacred part of the building with the charcoal still inside them. We found the stingray spines that were being used in the personal sacrifices, the knives that were used in human sacrifice. And so we were finding our hardcore archaeological data that would allow the interpretations being made in art history to appear more real or substantial and it had good archaeological data to say this is what was going on at that time. So, it was good.

AdC: While you were at Dumbarton Oaks did you get a chance to interact with the Senior Fellows at all? You mentioned that Robert Sharer was on the board at the time. Did you get introduced to any of the others?

RAF: Not really, no. Not that much. It was more really the Fellows that were here and the stuff we did and with Jeff. We just did a lot of sharing a lot of discussion that just went into late night many times but not with the Senior Fellows so much.

AdC: But Robert Sharer was influential during your time here?

RAF: Oh, yeah. And as was with Bill Fash, you know. And we’d been working together for many years already so really the exchanges with them had already been pretty extensive.

AdC: So, how would you describe the role of Dumbarton Oaks in the development of Pre-Columbian Studies over the past few years? What direction would you like to see Dumbarton Oaks take in the future?

RAF: I think Dumbarton Oaks has found a fantastic formula and a great niche. I think the contributions that it makes, nobody else is making in the field. Most of us are so busy out hustling trying to find funds to do archaeological research or so busy in the academic institutions we’re teaching, having to deal with students permanently and teaching itself – the class work stuff – there’s very little time to think and to read and to write and that’s what you get at Dumbarton Oaks. In not just with the best resources you could think of in terms of information but also in a setting that is just delightful and I think stimulating too. Even just little coincidences – the gardens, I mean you go out in those gardens and sit or just walk around and they are inspiring, they’re just beautiful and I think that – and that’s Landscape Architecture – but that beauty helps to establish that atmosphere that is conducive to good thought and work and in my case it was clearly something that changed my career, changed my life, even my outlook on my profession. The second I left, the first question on my mind was how can I come back? I really don’t think I would change anything because in my own personal experience it was already fabulous. It was already outstanding. It really changed my career and my life too.

AdC: Considering how much impact it has had on your life would you hope that Dumbarton Oaks will continue reaching out to Latin America to try to involve the scholars there and try to make their resources more accessible in those areas of the world?

RAF: Definitely. I think coming to Dumbarton Oaks is a privilege to any scholar. Those from the United States tend to have more of those very valuable resources in their research institutions, their universities. In Latin America it tends to be less so. There are of course some very important research centers throughout the region, in Lima or in Mexico even Guatemala City you have some outstanding resources, but the combination of the other elements involved, the discourse with these other people from other fields, the setting in Washington D.C. – because it’s not just about the physical installations at Dumbarton Oaks that are so beautiful, but it’s also that you’re in Georgetown, that the Smithsonian is right down the road, and stuff like that. So, it’s a wonderful experience because of that entire environment, and two, the other scholars just coming through. You do have some Fellows that have been here before and while you’re here they drop by, you sit down, you chat with them. It becomes a hub of intellectual exchange, not just with the people here but with all those people that come through, visit, etcetera. And everybody who’s in Washington that’s in our field, this is the place where they would drop by and say hello and that was also very – Norman Hammond, I remember, was one of those individuals who came by while we were here and again, very productive exchanges. We could throw stuff out, talk about it, and think better that way.

AdC: Did you meet any scholars here in particular besides those who were your fellow Fellows that you have gotten to know over the years? Or is it mainly the Fellows you were here with?

RAF: With the Fellows that I was here with we established a lifelong friendship. Those are people that are just very dear to my heart, period. And with all of them, we have gone on to do additional work together, be it in Copán or elsewhere with traveling exhibits, with publications. We established some very important personal relationships with the Fellows that were here while I was here and with other colleagues. I mean, somebody like Norman Hammond, I did not know him before I came and of course since then it has – we’ve been – more dialogue, more discourse with him. You know, he comes to Copán we have to take time to show and share and talk and have a meal. So overall it was an important crossroad, I think, in terms of having other scholars, come to get to know them but the closest ties were definitely with the Fellows that were here with me.

AdC: Well, I actually think that’s all of the questions I had written down for you. So, are there any other stories or memories you’d like to share or any other bits of information you want to share about Dumbarton Oaks before we finish the interview?

RAF: All I really and truly – how can I summarize this? Dumbarton Oaks is like a treasure, it’s just incredible to think that institutions like this exist and that they can contribute, in my personal case, so much and to the field so much. And it’s all done with the highest standards possible so it’s a privilege.

AdC: Well, thank you so much. This was a very interesting conversation and I wish you luck with the rest of the Copán workshop.

RAF: You know even just today it’s up to par already. Discussions have been very good.